Renuka Karli, dressed in a red and white swirling sari, sits on the stone floor of a room which houses her entire family. In front of her is a ball of green string, an aluminum dish containing tobacco and tendu leaves, and a large pair of scissors. As she talks her hands move quickly, pinching some tobacco, rolling it in a leaf, tucking, tying, snipping and bundling until she has a neat bunch of hand-made cigarettes or bidis, which she adds to a growing pile.
She maintains eye contact with me, her fingers moving independent of her gaze. ‘Last November the minimum wage for bidi-rollers went up from 44 rupees per thousand bidis to 50 rupees [around 60p], but my contractor didn’t pay me the extra’ she says. Renuka rolls a thousand bidis a day, seven days a week. ‘I knew about the wage increase from our meetings, so I went to him and said, if you don’t pay me I’ll collect everyone together and we’ll stop working for you.’ She smiles. ‘Immediately he paid me.’
For the past 35 years women in Gujarat, northern India, have empowered each other to tackle the manifold problems that come of being poor and female. The Self Employed Women’s Association (Sewa), a trade union run by and for poor women, now has close to half a million members in Gujarat alone. They live in the slums and tenement buildings of big cities like Ahmedabad, where I found 26-year old Renuka, and in the villages of the arid surrounding countryside.
Renuka has been a member of Sewa for 10 years. She first joined Sewa bank, a profit-making bank owned by Sewa members, because she wanted to save money and couldn’t elsewhere as she is illiterate. Now she attends Sewa union meetings twice a month where the women discuss any problems they are facing and make sure all members are aware of their rights and of any policy changes. She no longer accepts rotten leaves from her contractor. Renuka’s family benefits from her improved working conditions; she has money to spend on vegetables and can send her children to school.
Sewa counts among its members bidi-rollers, street vendors, construction workers, waste pickers, garment stitchers and field labourers, to name but a few. Almost all of them live in poverty: 50% of Sewa’s members earn less than $1 a day, while the majority of the rest earn under $2 a day.
I spoke to women who had been beaten by the police, cheated by suppliers, denied recognition of their work by the government, and made to pay unfairly high prices. Their problems were varied, but in all cases Sewa helped either through members’ collective bargaining power (with influence right up to government level), through capacity building (training women to know their rights and to read and write), by offering loans (to stop women having to go to usurious money-lenders) or by offering social services such as childcare.
Since its inception Sewa has had many successes at policy level – in the past five years alone it secured a minimum wage for incense rollers and kite-makers. It has also shown it can improve women’s confidence and earnings. A survey showed that women who borrowed from Sewa bank had a higher income than control groups.
Many Sewa women use their capabilities to help others. Sewa’s health cooperative is one of several Sewa cooperatives designed to improve the lives of local men, women and children. It makes a profit by selling health insurance and cheap generic drugs to those who need them, and has trained 600 poor women as health workers. Chanchi Bhikai from Vinchhiya, a village 80kms outside Ahmedabad, is one of these. ‘If someone is sick they come to me first’ she says, ‘we are the barefoot doctors’. She distributes medicines, raises awareness and demand for healthcare, sells insurance and takes people to the government hospitals where she negotiates with doctors for free, appropriate treatment. If they need extra medicines she can get them from the Sewa shop. The role has revolutionized Chanchi’s life, as she now has an income and the respect of higher-caste people, where before she was abused by her higher caste neighbours and earned only wheat flour from labouring in the fields.
Empowering women not only enables them to improve their lives, it helps them to improve their communities and to do so in a lasting way because, as Sewa’s secretary Mittal Shah says; “The change comes from within the community.” Financially and in terms of decision-making, Sewa women are self-reliant in many of their activities, and strive to be so in all.
For poverty reduction, health improvements or any of the international community’s other development priorities – as spelt out in the Millennium Development Goals – to become a permanent reality, Sewa has shown that empowering poor women to deal with their own problems is an excellent place to start.
If poverty has a female face – 70% of the world’s poor are women – then in Gujarat she’s probably wearing a pink sari and toiling in the fields. But she’s probably also fighting for a better wage.
Source: guardian.co.uk
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