Right to Food: Women Fight Back

Showing remarkable persistence and spirit, the women of Jhikra panchayat, in a neversay- die attitude, continued a ten-month-long struggle to find a solution to the corrupt practices of local PDS dealers and a hand-in-glove administration, to finally be rewarded with access to food that is legally and rightfully theirs…

I t was an unusual day on the Dumka Pakur highway on a hot, sunny afternoon. One hundred SHG members of Jhikra panchayat of Kathikund were sitting silently on the road next to the police station, blocking the highway. The police were there too, threatening to shoot them. The women, undeterred by the threats, remained firm, refusing to step back.

An hour later, the scene changed. The media arrived and a crowd gathered, wanting to know why the women were sitting on the road in the scorching heat. The policemen, who had been pointing the guns at the women, backed off; officers from the police station came to the women and offered to talk on the women’s terms and conditions.

For months, the women had been seeking action against the corrupt Public Distribution System (PDS) dealers but all their attempts had failed; as a last resort, they had come to protest at the police station. It was a test of their belief in group strength. And they proved the magic of it. They had heard of the story of how an individual stick could be broken, but a bundle of sticks would be difficult to break. All their lives, these women had been discriminated against in their homes, in their families and in their communities. That day, however, they recognized their strength and shone together.

Background

In Kathikund block of Dumka district, malpractices existed in all the 55 PDS shops. There were constant complaints that the distributors cut down the measure of rations allotted for a family, charged high prices for subsidized rice and kerosene oil, and took signatures for the allotted quantity illegally but gave the cardholders less than what was recorded. There was no proper or transparent measuring system. Ration was distributed using tin containers, the capacity of which was not clear. Dealers hoarded large amounts of rice and kerosene oil, which they distributed at high prices to non-cardholders. There were many murmurs about the widespread irregularities in all the PDS shops in Kathikund. But the corrupt PDS dealers were little affected by these rumblings.