Implementing or Ignoring the Law on Sexual Harassment?

By Dr. (PhD) Anagha Sarpotdar (anagha.sarpotdar@gmail.com) has a doctorate in the social sciences and is based in Mumbai.

The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act was passed in 2013 but not many companies in Mumbai have taken its provisions seriously or formed the mandatory internal complaints committees. A survey of how complaints by women were treated by some companies and what the internal committee members had to say shows that employer response to their women personnel and staff victimises the victim.

In early October, the Mumbai High Court ruled that it is the duty of every company to ensure that proper safeguards are provided to protect women from sexual and other harassment at work. “It is about time that every organization makes a list of dos and don’ts for male employees vis-à-vis their conduct towards women colleagues,” said a bench, headed by Justice V M Kanade (Times of India 2016). The complainant had alleged that her superior had not only made sexual advances towards her but even threatened to scuttle her career growth, if she refused. The bench, however, held that the findings of the internal complaints committee (ICC) and disciplinary committee showed that they had examined all allegations and held the officer guilty of misconduct.

The bench said sexual misconduct cannot be viewed casually and must be dealt with firmly and there should be an inbuilt internal mechanism so that instances of harassment can be conveyed confidentially to a senior woman officer. “Internal committees should be constituted to ensure that such instances are nipped at the inception itself.” It also pointed out that while Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act was passed in 2013, most firms have not set up complaints panels and must do so expeditiously (Times of India 2016).

A gender diversity study (TeamLease 2016) has revealed that more than 72% women feel that gender discrimination exists at workplaces and that initiatives like anti-sexual harassment policies need to be boosted by employers. This was reflected in the data provided by the corporate affairs ministry, Government of India which showed that reported complaints of sexual harassment within the top 100 companies listed on the National Stock Exchange doubled in the financial year 2014–15 as compared to the previous one (Asian Age 2015). Paradoxically, employers were found to be unequipped to tackle the problem. The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI)–Ernst and Young study (2015) revealed that one in every three Indian companies that is 31% had not yet set up ICC and 40% had not oriented the members to legal provisions while 35% were unaware of the penal consequences of not complying with the law. Around 44% did not create awareness about the law among employees (Bhattacharyya 2015; Sharma 2015).


Researching the Issue

In this context, I argue that employer response to reported complaints of sexual harassment has been dubious and problematic before enforcement of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. This is substantiated by findings of the research undertaken by me as fulfilment of the PhD programme at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai between 2012 and 2014. The need for such research arose from the poor implementation of the Vishakha guidelines (1997). One of the objectives of the research was to understand and analyse employer response to reported complaints of sexual harassment by women. It was done prior to the enforcement of the 2013 act and provided insights into status of compliance by organisations to the then existing legal framework.


Methodological Approach

Research questions required that a qualitative approach was followed. More specifically, phenomenology was chosen in order to get a both closer and deeper understanding of lived experiences of individuals who implemented the Vishakha guidelines and those who were affected by their implementation. This helped in bringing out new and context specific knowledge both from the compliance and process point of view.

Mumbai was chosen as the research setting taking into consideration that it is the economic capital of India and home to different kinds of organisations. There were numerous challenges in terms of locating participants for research and gaining their consent. Women’s organisations and/or groups, human and/or women’s rights lawyers, and the state commission for women became contact points to get in touch with women who reported sexual harassment and individuals who had experience in implementing the Vishakha guidelines. Lawyers, trade union members and representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) functioning as external members with complaints committees were willing to be part of the research.

A few participants were selected using purposive sampling (Welman and Kruger 1999) and others were located using the snowballing technique (Babbie 1995; Crabtree and Miller 1992). The sample size was 27. Out of these, six persons were members of complaints committees including chairpersons, three were human resources professionals, six were from NGOs and women’s organisations, two were members of trade unions and three were lawyers. Seven women were complainants who had reported sexual harassment at their workplaces. Out of these seven, four were employed with government organisations while three were working in private sector companies.

The challenge in locating and accessing participants for research reflected lack of uniformity in participant profiles. The sample was not representative in terms of participant activities except that all participants were employed with the organised sector and were concerned with the implementation of the Vishakha guidelines. Data collection was done using single in-depth semi-structured conversational interviews.

Experiences of the participants were captured in three themes. One of the prominent themes that emerged was employer response to reported complaints. This particular theme is especially important because it provides a base to understand and analyse prevailing situation relating to compliance to the current law on sexual harassment. The theme was analysed from the point of view of employer compliance to the Vishakha guidelines.


Major Findings

Writings and studies in India during 1997–2013 reveal under-reporting of sexual harassment, and poor implementation of the Vishakha guidelines leading to ineffective resolution of reported complaints (Saheli 1998; Sakshi 2000; Sanhita 2001; SARDI 1999; Lawyers Collective and ILO 2002; Yugantar 2003; CII 2005; Chaudhuri 2006; CFTI 2010). Situation continues to be sluggish after the 2013 act was enacted Phadnis and John (2014), Singh (2015) and DNA (2015). This is substantiated by findings of the present research.

Overall, organisations flouted the Vishakha guidelines. However, persistent efforts by the women and pressure from external agencies compelled employers to implement the guidelines. Even though it was done half-heartedly complaints committees were constituted or activated after complainants insisted and/or when there was pressure from external agencies like the state commission for women and high court.

It was found that women did not complain immediately after the incidents of sexual harassment occurred. In fact, registering a complaint with the employer was considered as the last choice and was resorted to when they found the workplace atmosphere becoming intimidating and difficult to handle. Their well-being and health was affected. Many of them did not have information about the complaint mechanism within their organisations and sought the help of women’s organisations, the police or the state commission for women.

When the women reported sexual harassment to persons in positions of authority, they were laughed at or were not believed. The complaints were rendered insignificant and branded as psychological problems, administrative harassment arising from the complainant’s non-performance, workplace politics, ragging or rude behaviour. Since these complaints were not considered grave enough to warrant attention, they were invariably dismissed. It must be noted here that non-verbal forms of sexual harassment were not regarded as harassment and the woman was blamed for making an issue out of “nothing.”

Retaliation from the employer after complaint was distinctly seen in all cases and this was a trend that was seen much more in the private sector where the complainant women’s services were terminated or they were compelled to resign due to humiliating working conditions deliberately created by the employer. The nature of retaliation in the government organisations differed substantially from the private sector. For these women, sexual and administrative harassment escalated after they complained. In all cases, however, the women were subjected to senior management personnel actually devising ways of troubling them further.

The experiences of the women complainants discussed here were substantiated by members of NGOs functioning as external members on the complaints committees, and by lawyers and trade unionists. The NGO members said that employers largely denied the existence of sexual harassment in their organisations and most of them were convinced that the environment in their organisations was safe for the women employees. As a result, the implementation of the Vishakha guidelines was undertaken reluctantly and led to low awareness among the employees about the entire issue and existence of the complaint mechanism. Almost everyone I interviewed said that the sexual harassment policies were vaguely framed because these employers did not envisage the different situations emerging from such harassment.

The NGO members further shared that employer response to reported cases was subjective and varied according to their perception about the issue and interest in the reported complaint. The response was never sympathetic and was actually negative, casual and attempted avoidance. Sexual harassment was treated as “normal” behaviour and not dealt with seriously thus forcing the women to reach out to external agencies such as the police.

The lawyers I spoke to observed that multinational companies only pretended to adhere to strict global standards but sexual harassment at the workplace was not seen as a form of violence against women or violation of rights of women employees. The employers believed that the woman was making the complaint with an ulterior motive. As a consequence, the response was negative and any show of insistence from the woman resulted in her being accused of poor performance of her job or vindictive behaviour. While her work and leave records were examined with intent to find faults and serve her with memos and termination notices, the man she had complained against was let off without any action. In fact, the woman faced isolation within the workplace and in many cases the human resources personnel ensured that her complaint was ignore or treated lightly.

Employers need to make sure that ICCs under the Companies Act, 2013 are constituted as mandated. Similarly, an efficient anti-sexual harassment policy is required to be drafted so that it is compliant with the 2013 act and addresses even those areas which the law fails to. The definition of sexual harassment should be broadened to cover the overall work culture and the ICC should meet regularly to gain visibility and reach out to the women in the organisation even when there are no reported complaints of sexual harassment. Though the act does not mandate presence of an external member in the quorum, the compulsory presence of such a member should be ensured during the committee’s meetings and proceedings.

As stated by Hersch (2015) despite being illegal, costly, and an affront to dignity, sexual harassment is pervasive and challenging to eliminate. Sincerity of purpose, interpretation of the legislation by the employers in keeping with its spirit and contextualising it with the struggle from which it emerged will go a long way in bringing about the safety of women employees at workplaces.

- See more at: http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/44-45/commentary/implementing-or-ignoring-law-sexual-harassment.html#sthash.ZXoQ1fTJ.dpuf



Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.

Kolkata slumdwellers break down the walls that divide

It was business as usual in Panchanantala slum in South Kolkata that afternoon. Men were at work, some hawking fruit or sawing pieces of wood, others grabbing a siesta before returning to work. Women busied themselves washing utensils or clothes in front of their home while children shouted with laughter, disappearing through the maze of crowded lanes crisscrossing the rows of shanties. Teenage girls dressed in printed gowns went about their daily chores, barely casting a glance at strangers like us wading through the garbage and puddles of water, a little lost and unsure. The routine ordinariness in Panchanantala  concealed the fact that less than 34 hours ago, these very same people had sprung into action to create history of sorts: men, women and children had emerged from their shanties and rushed, spontaneously risking their own lives, to rescue patients trapped in a high-rise hospital building engulfed in poisonous smoke.     

December 9 dawned ominously upon the city with more than 90 people suffocating to death in a hi-tech hospital, the worst tragedy in a medical institution in the country. When in the wee hours of Friday, two women in the slum smelt smoke and were alerted by the screams for help from patients of the hospital overlooking the slum, they immediately raised an alarm. It was a little past 2 am, but within minutes young boys and middle-aged men from the slum rushed to the gates of the Advanced Medical Research Institute (AMRI), a well-known hospital in south Calcutta, to help rescue operations, only to be rudely turned away by the hospital security guards who bolted the gates to prevent their entry.  “We implored  the guards that there was a fire and patients were crying for help. They said they were taking care of the situation and demanded that we leave,” said Bappa Das, a class X student in the local school. 

Undeterred, the men cut through the barbed wire and made a hole with shovels in the 10-feet-high brick wall surrounding the hospital and separating it from the slum. Even as a blanket of thick smoke engulfed the annex of AMRI where serious patients in special care units and orthopaedic cases were housed, the men constructed crude bamboo ladders to climb the high walls and women made ropes of their saris and dupattas to aid the effort. Two hours later, at 4 am, the fire brigade arrived with manual ladders and no breathing apparatus. But even before the fire brigade and the police could get into the act of rescuing patients from the top floors of the hospital, the slumdwellers had scampered to the top floor on bamboo poles, water pipes and wooden ladders rushed from the slum, and braved the blinding smoke to drag out patients who were gasping for breath. In the din and chaos of darkness enveloped by the poisonous gas and screaming patients, groups of slumdwellers joined by the fire brigade, police and some hospital staff realised the worst-affected were the patients on the fourth floor, surrounded by monitors and drips and innumerable medical equipment. “We could see all around us the evidence of patients who had dragged themselves to the windows and shattered the glass panes in order to breathe and escape death, but had failed,” said Bappa.  

Many patients survived the trauma and were rushed to nearby hospitals, others were not so lucky. Among the dead were two young nurses from Kerala who made valiant efforts to save their patients while two young boys of Panchanantala’s rescue team are still battling for life in a city hospital.  Senior officials both from the police and fire departments have acknowledged the role played by the locals in saving the lives of many AMRI patients. “They were with us throughout the day, evacuating the patients and reaching the hospital gates long before us,” admitted a senior police officer of the local Lake thana.  “They were tremendous. Simply tremendous.”

It was the local slumdwellers, against whom the high walls of the hospital were built, who proved to be the saviours, the Good Samaritans, that fateful morning. Gurupada Mandal, a mason, was watching Vidya Balan gyrating in The Dirty Picture promos on TV when we met him on Saturday afternoon sitting on a bed that covered the matchbox-sized room. Hiding his annoyance at being disturbed, he did not understand why he should be interviewed for what he thought was an ordinary act. “My wife woke me up and urged me to go and help patients who were screaming for help. Without thinking I ran and called my neighbour. Together, we took a shovel to break a hole in the wall.  Since I am a mason I have bamboo poles and with some rope we tied them together and made a ladder to climb the hospital building,” said Mandal in a matter-of-fact tone.

Read in Detail: http://infochangeindia.org/disasters/related-changemaker/kolkata-slumdwellers-break-down-the-walls-that-divide.html

Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.

India , 53 million-plus cities vs 355 million-plus districts

The regular release of data by the Census of India is slowly building up the picture of human development and social sector gaps over the last decade. When read together with the large body of field and social science study on national and state experiences with development routes, the insights that Census 2011 provides can be a powerful tool for planning and public participation. New data on urban and rural populations, gender ratios on literacy and in the 0-6-years population bands are already providing early indicators of leading and lagging districts, building up a detailed picture of how each of the country's 640 districts is faring.

Data from early and provisional Census 2011 releases has led to comparisons of urban size, the speed of urbanisation that has taken place in the leading economic clusters of India, and has prompted forecasts about the size of India's economy based on the trend of continuing population growth in existing and new urban centres. This, however, is only a part of the Census 2011 picture. The numbers are provisional and their verification is a slow process, to culminate in the district-level handbooks which will contain the primary census abstracts for every panchayat and block in India.

With the data releases coming during the final stages of the consultation rounds for the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-17), the census has the potential to inform and guide the policymaking process, provided of course the correct inferences are drawn from what is available. 

The vast numbers which characterise the Indian census have led to a focus thus far on the immense scale of demographic movement in the country, which can be seen in the increase, from 2001, in the urban population from 286.1 million to 377.1 million, in the rapid addition to the already large group of towns in India, from 5,161 in 2001 to 7,935 in 2011 -- an astonishing addition which has meant the transformation, at the rough rate of five a week for 10 years running, of 2,774 settlements into towns, however loosely the term 'town' is used.

Less impressive numerically but very significant economically is the increase, in the last 10 years, in the number of urban agglomerations. For the census, an urban agglomeration is a continuous urban spread comprising one or more towns and their adjoining outgrowths. These have increased in number from 384 in 2001 to 475 in 2011 and are 91 chaotic, new, barely-municipal reminders that the flow of people from rural tehsils to urban wards has strengthened even further in the last decade. The central government sees much good in this transformation, and foregrounds the economic benefits of this change by employing a one-way lens. What happens when such a lens is used to assess such a change can be seen in the 'Approach Paper to the 12th Five-Year Plan', finalised by the Planning Commission of India in August 2011 and released in September. "It is well-known," says the Approach Paper, "that agglomeration and densification of economic activities (and habitations) in urban conglomerations stimulates economic efficiencies and provides more opportunities for earning livelihoods. Possibilities for entrepreneurship and employment increase when urban concentration takes place, in contrast to the dispersed and less diverse economic possibilities in rural areas."

The 53 million-plus cities vs 355 million-plus districts

The urban-centric bias of the Government of India and its principal ministries and agencies has influenced national policy for the last two Plan periods, and is a tendency that will continue for at least the duration of the 12th Plan and possibly beyond, for as long as the fixation with high annual economic growth rate continues. Yet, if there are 53 cities whose populations are a million residents and more, and these are considered essential for the stimulation of economic efficiencies, then there are 355 districts whose rural populations are a million residents and more, whose agricultural outputs and surpluses not only provide them livelihoods, but feed the favoured residents of 53 million-plus cities and of 7,935 towns.

That is why it is worth examining, in greater detail, these rural districts and the people who inhabit them, insofar as the small data sets released by the Census of India 2011 will allow. The first indication that measures of the rural population describe an India quite different, in movement and settlement, from the force that shapes towns and cities is seen in the composition of the top of the list. There are no familiar metropolitan names here, no powerful centres of commerce and influence which are so commonly found in contemporary reportage of the Indian condition. Of the 30 districts with the most rural populations, there are 8 in West Bengal, 8 in Bihar, 8 in Uttar Pradesh, 2 in Andhra Pradesh, 3 in Maharashtra and 1 in Karnataka. Of the top five West Bengal has 4 -- South 24 Parganas (6.06 million), Murshidabad (5.69 million), Paschim Medinipur (5.22 million), Barddhaman (4.64 million) and Bihar's Purba Champaran ranks fifth (4.68 million).

These districts and their rural residents describe India's dependence on its diverse agricultural systems, its natural resources, its stock of traditional knowledge. The list of the top 10 districts with the highest rural populations is completed with Purba Medinipur (West Bengal), Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh), Madhubani (Bihar), Muzaffarpur (Bihar) and North 24 Parganas (West Bengal). The 30 districts with the largest rural populations have between 3.43 and 6.06 million residents in each. Their historicity as the locus of population density in the subcontinent -- as recorded in the early census reports from the late-19th century onwards, and described in lyrical detail in the Census of 1911 -- has been overtaken by the market that the 53 million-plus cities represent, and the reckless pampering of urban growth at the expense of rural resilience. There ought not to have been a battle for financial resources between the 160.5 million residents of the million-plus cities, and the 693.9 million rural residents of the million-plus districts -- but that is the bias with which the 12th Plan will approach both constituencies of Indians.

Odious as the urban flavour to national planning is, rural transformation and conurbation has been a feature of demographic change in India for well over a century. One hundred years ago exactly, the report of the Census of India 1911 attempted to encompass the dimensions of such change. "With the spread of railways and the general improvement in means of communication, the smaller towns are growing in importance as distributing centres, but the process is a slow one and comparatively little progress in this direction has yet been made," said the section on 'Area, Population and Density' in Volume I of this landmark census. "The small market town so common in Europe and America is rarely found in India. Nor as a rule do the smaller Indian towns possess the other amenities associated with urban life in Europe, such as a better class of schools and public institutions of various kinds."

The challenge of gender ratios and density in rural districts

Having dealt with one basis for comparison, the 1911 report then provided a sociological overview of the transformation of the time: "It is true that a new type of town is springing up in the neighbourhood of important railway stations with stores and provision shops and a considerable coolie population, and that these in many cases have not yet reached the prescribed standard of population. But the total number of such places is still small, and their exclusion has had no material effect on the statistics." Then too, the 1911 Census thought fit to remind the administration of the variety of administrative divisions in what was British India, which included Baluchistan, Burma and the subcontinent that spanned these two provinces. "There are great local variations in density. In nearly two-thirds of the districts and states the number of persons to the square mile is less than 200, and in about a quarter it ranges from 200 to 500. The units with less than 100 persons to the square mile cover two-fifths of the total area but contain only one-eleventh of the population, while those with more than 500, though their area is only one-eleventh of the whole, contain one-third of the population."

One hundred years ago, an aspect of the changing demographies of British India which exercised the census officials of the time was the ratio between females and males in cities and towns. It remains a concern, a century later, although more widespread now and not confined to urban settlements, as is explained briefly anon. "As usual in Indian towns females are in marked defect," the 1911 report remarked on Bengal. "Their proportion is highest in the minor towns which are often merely overgrown villages; it is much smaller in the main centres of trade and industry, and smallest of all in Calcutta, where only one person in three is a female." Nor did Bombay prove different, for the 1911 report observed: "As in the other large cities of India females are in a great minority, there being only 530 to every thousand males. This proportion is the smallest yet recorded. In 1881 it was 661; it fell to 586 at the next census owing to the immigration of males to meet the rapidly growing demand for labour, and again rose to 617 in 1901, when plague had driven out more of the temporary settlers than of the permanent residents."

While not as severe as the ratios of that era, the gender ratios for the rural populations of districts in 2011 will, as more data is released by the Census authorities and as the verification cycles for the smaller administration units are completed, help explain the movement of labour, the patterns of migration (with which they will be read) and no doubt support the studies on the feminisation of agriculture we are witness to in India. The 2011 data show that in 122 districts, the female to male ratio of the rural population is 1 or more (the range is 1.00 to 1.18). Of the 30 districts which have the highest female to male ratios of the rural population, there are 11 in Kerala, 7 in Uttarakhand, 4 in Orissa, 2 in Maharashtra and one each in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh. Thereafter, in 112 districts the female to male ratios of the rural population are less than 0.90 (the range is 0.90 to 0.67). The district with the lowest ratio is Tawang (Arunachal Pradesh), followed by Chandigarh, South Delhi, North District (Sikkim), Dibang Valley and West Kameng (both Arunachal Pradesh RP), Kargil (Jammu and Kashmir), Daman, Nicobars and Anjaw (Arunachal Pradesh).

Carrying with it the potential to cause a demographic imbalance whose full import, a generation from today, we can only surmise is the gender ratio of the population between 0-6 years, that is, the children of these districts. There are 34 districts in which, amongst the rural population, the numbers of children between 0 and 6 years are 500,000 and above. That all these districts are in either Bihar (15) or in Uttar Pradesh (14) or West Bengal (5) is another outcome, over the decades since the early-20th century, of the population patterns observed in the final 50 years of colonial India. The 2011 data has shown that whether in the 34 districts with 0-6 year populations of 0.5 million, or in the top 10% of all districts (640), the rural population that is between 0-6 years old is about 90% of the district's total child population in that category.

It is insights such as this that Dr C Chandramouli, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, presaged in his introduction to the first provisional paper on the 2011 Census: “It provides valuable information for planning and formulation of policies by the government and is also used widely by national and international agencies, scholars, business persons, industrialists, and many more. In addition, the Census provides a basic frame for conduct of other surveys in the country. Any informed decisionmaking that is based on empirical data is dependent on the Census.”

What does the 0-6-years age-group data tell us?

When taken together with the 355 districts whose rural populations are all a million and above, the implications of such a concentration of the 0-6-year-old population in talukas and tehsils (more than those in town wards) become manifold. An immediate rendering of this concentration will take place in the health sector for it is there that imbalances in public expenditure and budget have been most severe. The Government of India has time and again claimed that the 11th Five-Year Plan (2007-12) has sought to raise the share of public expenditure on health (both central and in the states) from less than 1% of GDP in 2006-07 to 2% and then 3%. For this, the National Rural Health Mission (launched in 2005) was intended to strengthen healthcare infrastructure in rural areas, provide more sub-centres, better staff and equip primary health and community health centres.

Census 2011 will, over the months to come, indicate the degree to which these lofty aims -- often held up as evidence of the government's commitment to social equity -- have been met. To do this, the ratios will be layered between study outputs that bring out the insights of correlating large demographic data sets -- district health services, the national family health survey, planned rounds of the National Sample Survey and, despite the defensible criticism levelled against it, the 2011 BPL survey. Within this dauntingly complex data framework will need to be placed the Plan targets relating to infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate, total fertility rate, under-nutrition among children, anaemia among women and girls, provision of clean drinking water for all, and raising child gender ratio for the age-group of 0-6.

Where do the 640 districts and their rural populations lie on a simple child gender ratio scale? Ranked by female to male ratio within the 0-6 years category of population, the top 10% of all districts (that is, 64 districts) register a gender ratio of at least 0.97 and up to 1.01. The districts with the 20 most favourable female to male ratios for the 0-6 population are Dakshin Bastar Dantewada, Bastar, Bijapur, Koriya, Rajnandgaon, Narayanpur and Korba (all Chhattisgarh); Tawang, Papum Pare and East Siang (all Arunachal Pradesh); Nabarangapur and Malkangiri (Orissa); Lahaul and Spiti (Himachal Pradesh), Nawada (Bihar), Chandauli (Uttar Pradesh), Mamit (Mizoram), Pashchimi Singhbhum (Jharkhand), Tinsukia (Assam), South Andaman, and West Garo Hills (Meghalaya). Among the top 10% of districts with gender ratios for the 0-6 age group that are favourable to females, Chhattisgarh has 14 while Orissa, Meghalaya, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have 6 each. These are considered, by their states and by the central government's ministries and departments, to be 'backward' districts, tribal in character, lacking in infrastructure and below par in economic development (discounting for this index the proclivity of the state to steal natural resources in the commons, the better to convert it to GDP with). Yet the residents of these districts have proven, as the 2011 data so emphatically shows, that they practice an equality that is far closer to that enunciated in our Constitution than is to be found in the ranks of the million-plus cities.

Even so, the picture at the other end of the scale is a worrisome one. Within the 0-6 years category of the rural population of districts, there are 154 districts whose female to male ratio is less than 0.90, ie 9 girls or less for every 10 boys. In this large set of districts with unfavourable gender ratios amongst the rural population category of 0-6 years, the range of this ratio drops to 0.70 (the average gender ratio for this group of districts being 850 girls to 1,000 boys). There are 24 districts in UP in this set (out of the state's 71 districts), 20 districts each in Punjab and Haryana (out of their totals of 20 and 21 respectively), 18 each in Rajasthan and Maharashtra (out of 33 and 35 respectively) and 14 in Jammu & Kashmir (out of 22).

What effect has this imbalanced ratio, so common in the rural populations of districts, on literacy and education? Census 2011 has told us so far that there are 55 districts in which the rural literacy rate is 74% or higher -- this is the national effective literacy rate (for the population that is seven years old and above) which is a figure derived from rural and urban, male and female literacy rates. The literacy rates in these 55 districts are for all persons, female and male together. They range from 74% to 89%. All 14 of Kerala's districts are among the 55, there are 7 districts from Maharashtra, 5 from Tamil Nadu, and 4 each from Mizoram, Orissa and Himachal Pradesh. The top 10 districts in this set are all from Kerala save one, East Delhi. But these 55 districts have returned literacy rates that will form the basis of study and analysis in the years to come, they are outnumbered, by a factor of more than 11 to 1, by districts whose rural populations lie under the 74% national mark, and this too will serve as an early indicator, continually updated, of the commitment of the Indian state to its implementation of the Right to Education (RTE) Act of 2009, and of the results of the first 10 years of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

Literacy rates, education gaps, too few teachers

Since its inception in 2001-02 the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) has been treated by the Government of India and the states as the main vehicle for providing elementary education to all children in the 6-14 age-group. Its outcome -- this is how the annual and Plan period results of India's 'flagship' national programmes are now described -- is the universalisation of elementary education. The Right to Education Act (RTE) of 2009 gives all children the fundamental right to demand eight years of quality elementary education. For the planners in the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the effective enforcement of this right requires what they like to call 'alignment' with the vision, strategies and norms of the SSA. In so doing, they immediately run into a thicket of problems for, to begin with, there are half-a-million vacancies of teachers in the country, another half-million teachers are required to meet the RTE norms on pupil-teacher ratios, and moreover 0.6 million teachers in the public school system are untrained.

This is the creaking administrative set-up against which the total literacy rates of the 585 districts whose rural populations are under the 74% mark must be viewed. Of these, 209 districts have literacy rates for their rural populations which are between 50% and 60%. This set of districts includes 33 from Uttar Pradesh, 30 from Madhya Pradesh, 20 from Bihar, 18 from Jharkhand, 17 from Rajasthan, 13 each from Assam and Andhra Pradesh, and 9 from Karnataka. And finally, there are 95 districts whose literacy rates of the rural population are under 50%. This set of districts at the bottom of the table includes 17 from Bihar, 14 from Rajasthan, 9 each from Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir, 7 from Madhya Pradesh and 6 each from Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Arunachal Pradesh. The districts of Yadgir (Karnataka), Purnia (Bihar), Shrawasti (Uttar Pradesh), Pakur (Jharkhand), Malkangiri, Rayagada, Nabarangapur, Koraput (all Orissa), Tirap (Arunchal Pradesh), Barwani, Jhabua, Alirajpur (all Madhya Pradesh), and Narayanpur, Bijapur and Dakshin Bastar Dantewada (all Chhattisgarh) are the 15 districts at the very base of the table with literacy rates of the rural population at under 40%.

Over 11 Planning periods there have been some cumulative gains in a few sectors. Today, in rural areas, seven major flagship programmes are being administered, with less overall coordination between them than is looked for – a contrast against the ease with which the central government's major ministries collaborate on advancing the cause of the urban elite -- but which nonetheless have given us evidence that their combined impact has improved the conditions of some.

The seven programmes are: the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NFRLM), Indira Awas Yojana (IAY), the National Rural Drinking Water Programme (NRDWP) and Total Sanitation Campaign (TSP), the Integrated Watershed Development Programme (IWDP), Pradhan Mantri Grameen Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), and rural electrification which includes separation of agricultural feeders and includes also the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana (RGGVY). For the local administrator these present a bewildering array of reporting obligations. A hundred years ago, such an administrator’s lot was aptly described by J Chartres Molony, Superintendent of Census 1911 in (the then) Madras: "The Village Officer, source of all Indian information, is the recorder of his village, and it well may be that amid the toils of keeping accounts and collecting 'mamuls', he pays scant heed to what he and his friends consider the idle curiosity of an eccentric sirkar."

Census 2011 also informs both the incumbent ‘sirkar’ and us that there are 22 districts in which literacy rates for the rural female population are above 74% (all 14 of Kerala's districts are included). However, it is in the next 10% range of literacy rates -- 74% to 64% -- that gains since the 2001 census must be protected and this set includes 82 districts. It is a widely dispersed set, comprising districts from 21 states and union territories. There are 11 from Maharashtra (including Sangli, Bhandara and Gondiya), 9 from Punjab (including Kapurthala, Gurdaspur and Sahibzada), 7 from Orissa (including Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapara and Bhadrak), 7 also from Himachal Pradesh (including Una, Kangra and Solan), 6 from Tamil Nadu (including Thoothukkudi and Nagapattinam) and 5 from Gujarat (including Navsari and Mahesana).

Bright spots in the rural female literacy story

The Office of the Registrar General of India, which administers the Census, has cautioned that all the data releases so far are still provisional figures. However, the implications are now plain to see, and give rise to a set of socio-economic questions which demographic and field research over the 12th Plan Period (2012-17) will enlarge and expand upon. Is there for example a correlation between districts whose rural populations have unfavourable female to male gender ratios and districts in which female literacy ratios are low? Comparing the bottom 100 districts under both conditions shows that there are only 12 districts in which both conditions are present (5 in Uttar Pradesh, 2 in Rajasthan, and 2 in Jammu & Kashmir).

Most encouraging is that there are 40 districts in which the ratio of the number of literate females to literate males (this is a different ratio from literacy rate), is 0.90 or better, ie there are 900 or more literate females to 1,000 literate males. In this set are all Kerala's 14 districts but also 13 districts from the Northeast (from Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland). The remainder are from island Union Territories, from the southern states (3 from Karnataka, 2 from Andhra Pradesh and one each from Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry), from hill states (2 from Uttarakhand, 2 from Himachal Pradesh) and one from Maharashtra. It is these districts that provide abundant reason for the allocation of a minimum 6% of GDP allocation for education -- a long-standing commitment -- which must begin to be fulfilled in the 2012-17 Plan period.

How will the Government of India consider these early indicators from Census 2011? How will India's civil society and the great breadth of organisations -- voluntary groups, people's movements, rural foundations and the like -- which have been delivering development 'outcomes', year after year, without the benefit of budgetary support but motivated by the plain fact that inequity still exists, how will this group see these indicators?

The Government of India revels in presenting contradiction as a substitute for careful, evidence-based and inter-generational planning. When downward trends -- such as those seen in female illiteracy and in the gender ratios of the 0-6 age-group -- have been slow over the last 25 years, there is a need to set long-term objectives that are not tied to the end of the next available Plan period, but which use a Plan direction to help achieve them. In this, the Approach Paper to the 12th Five-Year Plan has failed quite signally, because its authors have not drawn the only possible conclusions from the Census 2011 data presented till date. Yet others have done so, notably India's civil society and its more responsive group of academics. Hence the abundance of contradictions in all major documents -- the Approach Paper being the most important, annual Economic Surveys being another type -- which seek to reassure one section while in fact underwriting the ambitions of another.

The import of the 16 percentage point difference

So we see that a state which must ensure provision of Right to Education to every child up to the age of 14 years, because it is constitutionally bound to do so, complains in the planning phase itself that scarce resources constrain it from carrying out its duties and therefore advises its citizens that measures like public-private partnership (PPP) should be resorted to. How will such cunning better the lives and present culturally relevant opportunities for the rural populations in the remaining 591 districts which are under the 0.90 ratio for literate females to literate males? What will the emphasis on vocational training (for the urban job pools) instead of people's empowerment mean for the rural populations in 403 districts where this ratio is less than 0.75 -- which means the number of literate rural females is under three-fourths the number of literate males -- and in 69 of these districts it is even under 0.60 (25 in Rajasthan, 14 in Uttar Pradesh, 9 in Madhya Pradesh, 6 in Jammu and Kashmir)?

In the 631 districts with rural populations, the average difference between the literacy rates of females and males is 16 percentage points. What this means is illustrated by the districts of Pudukkottai (in Tamil Nadu, literacy rates 75.0% for males and 59.1% for females), Yavatmal (in Maharashtra, literacy rates 76.4% for males and 60.4% for females), Jharsuguda (in Orissa, literacy rates 74.4% for males and 58.4% for females), Hardwar (in Uttarakhand, literacy rates 65.9% for males and 49.8% for females), Raisen (in Madhya Pradesh, literacy rates 68.0% for males and 51.9% for females) and Vadodara (in Gujarat, literacy rates 69.2% for males and 53.1% for females). In these six the difference between female and male literacy rates is an average of 16 percentage points.

Rather than understand the underlying causes for rural populations in districts as varied as these to continue to experience an utterly unacceptable difference in literacy rates between women and men, the Government of India insists that "India's urban agenda must get much more attention" (Approach Paper to the 12th Five-Year Plan). Ignoring the evidence of continued neglect of rural populations, and ignoring too the lessons to be learnt from measured and reported gains in some rural districts, the current government and its advisory apparatus is focusing on India's increasing urbanisation as the only habitat that must be planned for. This approach to development -- which flies in the face of the hard evidence of substantial and persistent inequities presented by Census 2011 -- is dangerously uni-dimensional. It sees only that economic growth and urban market development are valid objectives for an India whose peoples have, for the 15th Census running (since 1872, the seventh since Independence), been enumerated with impartial care and implicit faith in our democratic institutions.

Infochange News & Features, November 2011

Source:http://infochangeindia.org/population/analysis/53-million-plus-cities-vs-355-million-plus-districts.html 

Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.

Shrin Juwaley: ‘Treat us as equals’

 It was on May 28, 1998 when life took a sudden turn for Shirin Juwaley, an acid attack victim. Juwaley was only 24 when her husband threw acid on her face, chest and arms and fled abroad. She was left with severe facial disfigurement and has undergone numerous surgeries since then. Scared and skeptical to face the world with her disfigured face, Juwaley refused to come out of her shell until one day she realised that she was wasting her life in this manner. “I decided to live life my way,” said Juwaley. Juwaley went on to start a non-profit organisation called Palash foundation, three months ago, which deals with issues of psychosocial rehabilitation and livelihoods for people with disfigurement.

On Wednesday, at Bonobo, a restobar in Bandra (W), people who faced discrimination because they were visually different came together and shared their personal experiences. The event called ‘Tweet Up night’ was organised by Palash foundation in association with mad o wot, a hair salon in Bandra.

 


Chetan Chavan, one of the speakers said, “At a very young age, some white spots started developing all over my body. Initially people thought that it was leprosy and I was shunned by society. My parents took me to various doctors, babas who claimed cure for all problems, etcetera. But the problem persisted. They were trying hard to change me so that I would fit into what is perceived as ‘normal’.” Chavan acknowledges that he did not face discrimination from his peers while interacting with them but, “when it came to sharing food from the same plate, people refused to do so.” It was at the time of getting married that he was hit hard by the discrimination. “I have white spots on my body and hand but not on my face. So, sometime people do not realise that I have a skin condition. But, I decided to hide nothing from the other party. People would approach me with a proposal but would turn away when they were told about my problem,” said Chavan who works in a private company and lives in Dadar. Abigal Vaz (33) from Vakola too faced a similar situation like Chavan. The reason being, Vaz was born without legs. “I walk with the help of two Jaipur feet but I am fully capable of independently carrying out my daily chores. In my 20s I too dreamt of having a family but everybody rejected me. Hence, I decided to look for somebody who would be like me so that I did not feel inferior in front of him,” said Vaz, who found her husband on a matrimonial site. Vaz’s husband lost one of his legs to polio when he was one-year-old. Since then Vaz has been living a happy married life and has a normal child.


Inspiring
Another inspirational story was of Parinaz Mubaraki’s (26) who is visually impaired. Born with a genetic defect, Mubaraki slowly started losing her vision when she was a child and lost her vision completely seven years ago.

“I don’t look like a blind person due to the fact that I wasn’t born completely blind. Sometimes people do not believe me when I tell them that I can’t see,” said Mubaraki, her voice choked with emotion. She recalls an incident during a stage performance at Bonobo. “It was an impromptu dance performance where we were performing with our belly dance teacher. We were unprepared so, we had to follow our teacher and repeat those steps. Since I couldn’t see, I kept doing my own thing and everybody was laughing. After the dance troupe left, I kept performing on the stage and the audience was wondering if there was something wrong with me. Finally, my teacher had to intervene and I got off the stage. I could hear the audience roaring with laughter because most of them did not realise that I was blind,” said Mubaraki, who works as a radio jockey.
Insulted by her friends and teachers in school, who did not take to her kindly, Mubaraki had started to lose hope until she met students from The Hellen Keller Institute for Deaf and Deafblind. Said Mubaraki, “I met students from the institute and I thought that if people who couldn’t see and hear were doing so well in their life, then I should be grateful that I can at least hear. I started attending counselling sessions and looking out for opportunities.”


Treatment

While most of the speakers claimed that they are hardly bothered by what other people think about them, often they feel awkward in public places when people gawk at them. “I have people staring at me everyday. Some of them even come near me to look at my face closely. But, they refuse to shake hands with me. What do I do?” said Juwaley.

Mubaraki says that when people misbehave, she tells herself, “It isn’t my disability, it is their stupidity and that is why they are laughing at me. Members of the audience too agreed with the speakers. One of them suggested that people alone couldn’t be blamed for the way they behave. “They have been attuned to think in a certain manner. For larger acceptance of people who are visually different, changes have to be made at the grassroot level itself.”

Source:  http://www.acidviolence.org/index.php/news/shrin-juwaley-treat-us-as-equals/

Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.

KARMAYUGA- ‘The Right every Wrong Generation’ Campaign launched to ignite the ‘Volunteer’ spirit among citizens

No Individual, Institution or Organization, not even the UN or any government  can Change the World but if every citizen practices her / his fundamental duties & Individual Social Responsibility,  then maybe collectively we could make the world a more egalitarian, just, humane & responsible society. Each of us can right a wrong and thus together as ONE we can RIGHT every WRONG.  ‘KARMAYUGA- The Right Every Wrong Generation’, a nationwide campaign has been launched by iCONGO and CtrlS on 12thOct’11, from Mumbai, with the core objective of bringing together and recognizing citizen volunteers/uncommon and unsung heroes , who through their focused action, are trying to lead the society towards a better tomorrow.

This initiative salutes and showcases the extra ordinary and inspiring work done by ordinary mortals, to Right a Wrong that they see around them. To be a part of the “Karmayuga Campaign” one need not join an NGO or campaign, nor give any money, clothes and newspapers to charity. All that one needs to do is do small simple acts with big commitment & involvement” to address wrongs in the society. The person can post his story on the official Karmayuga website www.righteverywrong.com , so that more people can follow his/her example and the tipping point reached, wherein everyone gets together to RIGHT every WRONG.

On the occasion Mr. Jeroninio Almeida, Founder-iCONGO said, “All our SIMPLE ACTIONS can make a BIG DIFFERENCE in bringing about a change in our world. We believe that a selfless citizen action can spark a mass movement where all citizens work “Together as One to Right every Wrong”.  The Matchbox symbolizes the idea of “Igniting Citizen Action”. He further added, “Our mission in a nutshell is to encourage social justice through citizen action. We believe that if citizens start doing small, simple actions in our own space and time, then one day we will see that big difference in real sense and this shall benefit our future generations. Probably the most powerful healing for all socio-political evils is the creation of more and more citizen heroes”. He appeals to all citizens to. Act NOW; DO SOMETHING to Right a WRONG around you and Belong to Karmayuga- The RIGHT every WRONG generation.
Present at the event Ms. Gul Panag, Founder, Social Outreach and Accreditation Programme (SOAP) said, “The Karmayuga Campaign is in its true meaning ‘Voluntary’ and to be a part of it each one has to become Anna Hazare themselves and to motivate people to help each other  in the real world.It is the most ethical concept ever put down to work. According to one’s own capabilities and discretion, volunteers are expected to work in their desired area of interest in their own way.”

Mr. P Sridhar Reddy, Chairman and Managing Director, CtrlS, shared his thoughts “Being India’s largest and only certified tier IV data center, we have always been led by an inherent drive to deliver technological innovations that build a sustainable eco system, thereby making this world a better place to live in. We’re proud to say CtrlS Mumbai; with a PUE of 1.4 is the most energy efficient datacenter in India. From implementing eco-friendly practices in our workplaces, to following tier IV standards of operation, or delivering excellence through our philosophy of ‘Total Ownership’, we believe sustainable solutions are the stepping stones for a secure tomorrow. We are in the business of protecting data with full confidentiality and have partnered Karmayuga to create more protectors for our planet and people.

We are delighted to say that partnering with iCONGO, has brought us another step closer to building healthier ecosystem. Every company today must have a holistic CSR policy that encourages employees to get involved in social issues. This will push the organization towards better efficiency and profitability.

The entire movement is powered by Ctrls – iCONGO Karmaveer Puraskaar- Global awards for Social Justice and Citizen Action, initiated by iCONGO 6 years back. Through KVP, iCONGO has been felicitating and highlighting the work done by citizens who have gone beyond their usual business and have readily Lead the Change in the society through selfless actions. Karmaveer awardees are fondly referred to as Noble Laureates and many of them have gone on and joined national committees and planning commissions as core members and had also served as ambassadors of global movements.”

“Belong to Karmayuga- The RIGHT every WRONG Generation – this is an opportunity to be a part of a social movement” says Rakhi Sarkar, Country Director – VSO India. We usually talk about our rights but as citizens of this country we have responsibilities as well. By becoming a part of Karmyuga it will be an excellent opportunity for citizens to engage and address the problems of social and economic inequity that surrounds them. Volunteering is a powerful instrument to promote inclusive development through active civic engagement.   Be a “Karmyugi” – this is an opportunity to be a part of a social movement and make a difference – your efforts do matter and can improve the prospects of people, communities and Indian society as a whole Rakhi added.

The top 20 stories will be awarded CtrlS- iCONGO Karmaveer Chakra, a medallion for proactive voluntary actions to Be The Change, instituted with the UN. . All people/ children/ youth who participate shall be awarded the “CtrlS- iCONGO KARMAVEER- THE RIGHT every WRONG Generation Certificate” for being the change and for promoting Social Justice through her/ his action.

The movement conceptualized & initiated by iCONGO (International Confederation of NGOs and VSO India) the world’s leading independent international development organization that works through volunteers to fight poverty in developing countries. The campaign is emphatically supported by renowned personalities including Mr. P Sridhar Reddy, Chairman and Managing Director of CtrlS, the largest tier iv datacenter in South Asia, and social activist and actress Gul Panag, (Founder of the volunteering movement SOAP).

Those Present at this event were Jeroninio Almeida , Gul Pang, P Sridhar Reddy , Abha Singh , Sailesh Mishra , Vincent Nazareth and Vandana Shah.

Many organizations, NGOs, Corporates, Academic Institutions and Media Houses, have joined hands with the Karmayuga Campaign as Initiative Partners to spread the message. The Initiative partners include-  UNV ( United Nations Volunteers), SOAP, RTF, RTI Nation, Goa Forgiving, The Image India Institute, World Comics Trust, GOD, SOIL, Skill share International, Silver Innings, Masoom, HFI, Samarthanam, OLPC, THF, Olives Bar and Kitchen, Dialogue India, Good Shepherd’s Home.

A co-branded Chakra has been created with each Initiative partner to felicitate their partners and supporters.

Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.

After the Slutwalk

I’m sitting in London and the BBC is reporting that hundreds walked Delhi’s streets on July 31 to protest sexual harassment – although, it noted, there was “little of the skimpy dressing that has marked protests elsewhere” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14357443). They write: “Most of the marchers in Delhi were soberly dressed in jeans and T-shirts or traditional shalwar kameez.” (Someone tell the BBC that even jeans and T-shirts are controversial in India – especially when young women wear them, provoking calls to ban women from wearing jeans every few years.) This would have left Indian media rather disappointed, having spent considerable airtime and vocal energies in the last few weeks anticipating with rising excitement what girls participating in Delhi’s SLUTwalk would wear. It’s that word that has caused all this excitement and disappointment, the debate, the sermonising, the distancing, the embracing.  

I’m at first relieved that Delhi’s Slutwalk march (also called Besharmi Morcha in an attempt to localise the march) did take place after all without any scuffle from rightwing hoodlums. I’m impressed that 19- and 20-year-old women pulled off organising it and articulating their thoughts to a paparazzi-like media. While I’m not sure if there really were ‘‘hundreds’’ of people on the street (and if there were, I don’t doubt that half of them were media) but just the fact that young girls and boys, a common public, not attached to women’s groups or political parties, came out onto the streets on a Sunday morning to protest against sexual harassment of women is to me, a critical turn in sexual politics. 

The resistance to the word ‘slut’ though is more difficult to understand. So a police officer in Toronto said in January 2011 that ‘‘if women don’t want to be raped they shouldn’t dress like sluts’’. So what? It’s not new to Indian ears. Our rape law was born from one such judgment – the Mathura case in which a young girl was sexually assaulted by two policemen, but the court did not find the policemen guilty, saying that Mathura was ‘‘habituated to sexual intercourse’’. The judgment led to outrage from women’s organisations, which called on the government to reform rape laws, which it did in 1983. Many cases have followed in Mathura’s wake: all of them have shown us that the state machinery routinely attributes blame for violence against a woman to her ‘character’ or lack thereof – insinuating of course sexual impropriety – or in other words, ‘sluttiness’.

The central idea behind the Toronto police officer’s comments is therefore not new to us even if the word ‘slut’ is. Just as the Mathura judgment enraged women’s organisations here in the early-1980s, the police officer’s comments enraged a young generation of women who decided to march the streets in their skimpiest clothing, making the point that whatever women wear, they cannot be violated – that a woman’s clothing has nothing to do with rape or sexual harassment. Within months women mobilised to hold mass demonstrations from Toronto in April 2011 to Chicago in June 2011 and in between in smaller towns like Dallas, Asheville, Ottawa, Boston, Denver, Calgary. Fuelled by social media outrage and videos and ideas going viral in cyberspace, it quickly outgrew Canada, sliding into neighbouring USA and even crossing the shores to Delhi – demonstrating the resonance that such an idea has across cultures.  

Over the last month, the chatter around Delhi’s planned Slutwalk has been phenomenal. Five thousand people have associated themselves with their Facebook page and even bothered to write a comment and engage with the issue. I have read debates on a feminist listserve, watched in amazement a whole page of newspaper dailies devoted to the event and listened quite agog to the special debates on the issue on news channels. The usual grouses have been shared widely: that it is a Western import– which it is but so was Take Back The Night and the 16 Days of Activism that takes place every November; not about poor women – which is not a necessary condition for the validity of a protest march; culturally insensitive and contextually misplaced – an old grouse. Women young and old, but especially young, from around the country have analysed, discussed and critiqued various aspects of the chatter: the problems with the word ‘slut’; the politics of clothing; strange justifications as to why men sexually harass women and so on. The discourse just got wider, more populated with opinions and just turned into a dynamic landscape over the last few months. 

Will there be any more Sluttalking now that the Delhi Slutwalk is over? Who knows, but beyond the chatter, I think we missed talking much about the elephant in the room: women’s sexuality and how younger women today are expected to be somewhat ‘sexy’ if they want some social currency. In a recent research study I was part of which explored what middle class women experience online, the majority of young women explicitly stated the desire to represent themselves as ‘sexy’ in pictures they put up online, believing that it increased their social status amongst peers and raised their own self-esteem. Their own definition of ‘sexy’ was very broad and hardly controversial – anything from fitted jeans or a sleeveless top or even styled so that they looked like a movie star. 

It is complicated: we now have a bevy of cheerleaders in IPL (usually women who are conspicuously not Indian), advertisements and popular culture replete with sexual and sensual references (especially positive affirmations by women themselves – think Sheila, Munni and so on) but still dressing ‘slutty’ (which, the Indian media tell us, means wearing ‘‘fishnet stockings and micro minis’’), as the subtext of debates on Slutwalk tell us, is crossing cultural boundaries. We are still hypocritical about acknowledging women’s sexuality and how it is really all around us today, and in flux.  

To be fair though, I have met many sex workers and women in prostitution, and have never seen them wear anything more or less than any other poor, marginalised women. But perhaps we would also like to be able to dress ‘like sluts’. Or wear red lipstick. Or a flower in our hair, a shiny nosepin. Just on any day, not just our wedding day when it is legitimate for a young woman to acknowledge her sexuality without the fear of being raped or being assumed to be a slut. I’ve never worn fishnets and a micro mini on the streets but now I know I probably can’t because the discussion around Slutwalk has made it clear that certain boundaries cannot be transgressed.

The division between good women/bad women is one of the deepest divides amongst women. An initiative like Slutwalk strikes a feeble but important blow at this iron wall (at least the way it has manifested in the West). Women not only spend their lives trying not to get raped but also trying not to be called sluts. This is of course difficult given that it takes very little to be called one, especially in our context: this one laughs too loudly, this one smokes, this one drinks wine, this one comes home late from work, this one is a dancer, this one talks to boys, this one leaves her hair open, this one wears lipstick, this one wore a sleeveless blouse, this one wears jeans… you get my drift. 

In our case, we were still distancing ourselves from sluts, not only not- embracing the word, but also the concept. A Slutwalk won’t reduce the number of rapes or directly reduce the number of cases of harassment on the streets – for that we will need sustained political will, convictions, safer cities, public attitudes, embracing women in the public sphere and many other things. But that isn’t the point (perhaps the most repeated refrain by people defending the initiative). A few weeks ago a man bludgeoned his daughter (in fact, try Googling ‘man bludgeons daughter’ to realise the volume of cases out there) to death because she went to the mall with boys (http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com). The point is what basic message the Slutwalk initiative gives out: in their website the Toronto organisers state that the reason for Slutwalk is ‘‘because we’ve had enough’’. 

Because, really, we have had enough.

Source: http://infochangeindia.org/women/third-wave/after-the-slutwalk.html

Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.

India Against Corruption: Janlokpal & CBI CVC

Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.

Why poor rural tribals will remain poor for generations

A new survey by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre identified 15 regions spread over six states where poverty is getting concentrated and chronic, and found that tribal and forested areas are likely to remain poor, with the decline in poverty among the rural tribal population going from 51.9% to just 47.3% .

  Poverty is becoming hereditary in India, at least for a sizeable population. That is the conclusion derived from a three-decade tracking of poor households in rural India.
A survey by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), an international association of researchers and academicians, claims that those who are chronically poor may pass on poverty to their next generation. What’s more, people residing in tribal and forested areas are likely to remain poor forever, fomenting violent conflicts in future. Most of India’s forested districts are already dens of Naxalites.

The survey, India Chronic Poverty Report, comes at a time when the country is awaiting its latest National Sample Survey for estimation of poverty. On April 21, while unveiling the approach paper to the 12th Five Year Plan for 2012-17, the Planning Commission disclosed that poverty has reduced from 37.2% in 2004-05 to 32% in 2009-10. The estimate is critical for the next Plan and the eagerly awaited and much debated National Food Security Law.

A controversy erupted the day the commission made the disclosure. The Supreme Court ordered the commission to explain how it fixed percentage of people below-poverty-line (BPL) at 36%. The percentage helps the commission decide the direction of development programmes and distribution of foodgrains under the public distribution system.

The apex court’s observation came in the wake of a petition filed by nonprofit People’s Union for Civil Liberties. The petitioner contends that adequate foodgrains are not being given to people living below the poverty line. This case is known as the Right to Food. The court also challenged the commission’s estimates of BPL families. “There cannot be two Indias,” said the apex court while describing the country’s high economic growth and consistent poverty. “The poverty level is reducing but at a slow pace,” says Biraj Patnaik, principal adviser to the court’s commissioners for the case.

Two Indias
The survey by CPRC explains the “two Indias”. “Why do some people remain poor for a longer period of time? Why do poor areas remain poor forever? These are the questions answered by the survey,” says Aasha Kapur Mehta, professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Public Administration in Delhi, who leads CPRC in India.
The survey followed about 3,000 households for almost 30 years across the country. It adopted a three-pronged approach to poverty: what drives poverty, what retains poverty and what causes exit from poverty.

CPRC has published 32 research papers in the past five years explaining various aspects of poverty in India. It defines the chronic poor as people who remain poor through their lifetime. Analysis of the papers shows that at least 50% of India’s poor are chronic poor. The survey identified 15 regions spread over six states where poverty is getting concentrated and chronic (see map). “Persistent backwardness and inequality have led to concentration of poverty in certain parts of India. So there is a geographical dimension to poverty,” says the CPRC report.

The count of very poor (with a consumption expenditure of Rs 9 per day per person) is an indicator of chronic poverty. Though the number of very poor is decreasing, the percentage is quite substantial. Their number was 115 million in 2004-05—37% of the total poor. The percentage of the very poor in the total population has declined in all states except Orissa, between 1983-94 and 2004-05. The percentage in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh is higher than the all- India figure.

The share of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh in the total of very poor people rose from 57.5% in 1983 to 66.8% in 1993-94 and to 70.6% in 2004-05. “This is alarming because the next generation of these people will also be poor. Thus a vicious cycle is created,” says Mehta.

According to the survey, people in tribal and forested or degraded forest regions are more likely to remain poor forever. Nine of the 15 identified regions are forested; they have been targeted for poverty alleviation programmes since the early-1950s.

The report says, “In forest regions, the issues are not so much agronomic or natural conditions as poor people’s access to the resources that are there, their human capital endowment and the way they are incorporated into labour market.” The survey points out the poverty reduction among tribals is slow. Estimates for 1993-94 and 2004-05 indicate that against a decline in poverty for the entire population from about 37% to 27%, the decline among the rural tribal population was from 51.9% to 47.3%.

Amita Shah, director of Gujarat Institute of Development Research, says, “Poverty reduction programmes must include issues of economic growth, employment generation, socio-spatial equity, environmental sustainability and political stability within a holistic framework.”

Why poverty becomes chronic
According to the survey, there is inequality in the efforts made to prevent people from poverty and get them out of it. The numerous poverty alleviation programmes are inadequate and insufficient. Of the 29 such programmes studied in the survey, only nine could prevent people from falling into the poverty trap. Thirteen could enable escape from poverty and 16 could alleviate chronic poverty. Consequently, says Shashanka Bhide, a senior fellow of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, a significant proportion of non-poor households may fall into poverty while a large proportion of poor may not manage to escape it.

The report is a wake-up call. “Social conflict may find easy recruits among the chronically poor, who have less to lose by engaging in conflict and might be mobilised by the politics of grievance,” says the report. Anand Kumar, professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, says, “The report points to four major deficits the country is facing—development, legitimacy, governance and democracy. This created another crisis, time deficit.” He adds, “People are no longer willing to wait; there is a sense of urgency, suggesting the need for continued mass mobilisation and protests.” 

The full report is available http://www.chronicpoverty.org/publications/details/india-chronic-poverty-report
 
This article first appeared in Down to Earth, May 31, 2011. Richard Mahapatra is a senior environmental journalist presently with Down to Earth, and a former Infochange Media Fellow.

Source: http://infochangeindia.org/poverty/books-reports/why-poor-rural-tribals-will-remain-poor-for-generations.html

 

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