There is an interesting hiatus between the perceptions of tribal women and the NGOs regarding the problem of child malnutrition in Madhya Pradesh state in India. While Chato, a Sahariya tribal woman, emphatically states that the lack of land, means of livelihood, electricity and medical facilities are the main barriers to keeping her children alive the NGOs are more concerned about the improper functioning and lack of universalisation of supplementary child nutrition services. Thus while the poor women have hit upon the correct analysis that the lasting solution to the problem of malnutrition is in providing adequate and sustainable livelihood opportunities the NGOs campaigning for an end to malnutrition on the other hand are more concerned with trying to improve the quality of the superficial bandage services being provided by the State. Plants need water at their roots and not on their leaves. The crisis of malnutrition is there among all the poor and Madhya Pradesh is the state with the most number of hungry people in India. However, the children owing to their lower immunity are more prone to die than their elders are. The truth is that devastation of livelihoods in Madhya Pradesh has taken place due to the adoption of wrong agricultural policies over the past forty years or so. The introduction of the cultivation of soyabean in the monsoon season has led to the gradual vanishing of such nutritious crops as jowar, bajra, makka, udad, tuar, moong and groundnut. Simultaneously in the winter season only wheat is sown and the area under gram has been going down. Thus while earlier the poor small farmers used to get nutritious food from their farms they now have to purchase food from the market at exorbitant prices. Moreover while agriculture was a profitable enterprise earlier because of subsidies provided for power and fertilizer now it has become a loss-making proposition due to the withdrawal of subsidies. The problem has been aggravated over time by the fragmentation of land with the increase in population. This has meant that there are now more landless labourers like Chato who get less work and less remuneration and so are in even greater trouble than small landholders. The Government and the NGOs do not seem to be aware of this fundamental problem of the unsustainability of agriculture. They have also ignored the severe patriarchal oppression that most poor women suffer that makes them work hard on little food and suffer from reproductive health problems in silence apart from bearing a number of children due to male preference. Women’s status has been further compromised with the introduction of cash crops as they have lost control over agriculture and the crops that used to be produced for home consumption. Now all the money from the sale of the cash crops is in the control of men who frequently fritter it away in consumption of alcohol or in gambling. Consequently mothers are anaemic with haemoglobin count of 7 or 8 gms per deciliter. Thus, the solution to the secondary problem of malnutrition, not only of children but of adults also, is to first tackle the primary problems of the unsustainability of agriculture and prevalence of severe patriarchal oppression.

“I felt very angry that after cutting down all our forests to supply timber to the cities, the Forest Department should blame us for the destruction. So I got the women of our village together and started protecting these hills and now nobody can blame us anymore,” says Daheli Bai, a Bhil tribal woman of Attha village in Alirajpur district of Madhya Pradesh in India replying to a question as to what had prompted them to protect their forests over the last two decades and render them as verdant as they are. Growing forests, greater availability of flowing water leading to reduced demand for artificial energy and greater agricultural productivity achieved through organic practices all contribute significantly to mitigation of climate change. When this is done through communitarian collective action and especially by women, then the gains in terms of social justice achieved are an added benefit. Thus the women of Attha have been mitigating climate change from much before it became a buzzword. The average annual rainfall in the area is 900 mm occurring in the monsoon period from mid June to mid October. Thus, this is a semi arid region and traditionally the Bhil tribals had adapted to this eco-system by doing some organic agriculture in the valleys and supplementing it with produce collected from the forests which were of a very rich dry deciduous kind with trees like teak, sisam, anjan, salai and an abundance of grasses, shrubs, creepers and herbs. Despite the hard rock undeneath the dense forests used to ensure that there was enough natural recharge of the rain through the fractures in the rock and so there used to be water in the streams throughout the year. Independence from British rule in 1947 ironically changed things for the worse. Alirajpur had earlier been ruled by a Prince who had very loose control over the tribals and they mostly lived in tightly knit communities bonded by customs of labour pooling in a subsistence forest based economy. The Forest Department was handed over the administration of the area which was converted into reserved forests and immediately the commercial exploitation for timber production began. This upset the fragile hilly eco-system of the region and soon with the forests gone the thin soils too were washed away and natural recharge of the rain was greatly reduced leading to the drying up of the streams. The Bhils’ livelihoods were the most affected as the fertility of their lands as well as the supply of forest produce went down. Simultaneously the provisions of the Indian Forest Act made them criminals in their own backyard and they were forced to pay bribes to the Forest Department staff for access to the forests. Then in 1983 the Bhil tribals of the area began organising to demand their rights and especially the right to protect the forests which were their main lifeline. They formed an organisation called Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) and began protecting the forests which had become denuded in about fifty villages in Sondwa Block. The women of Attha village under the leadership of Daheli Bai began the struggle and it soon spread to nearby villages. Daheli Bai along with Vesti Bai went upstream along the stream that ran through their village to the villages of Gendra and Fadtala and explained to the women there that since the stream originated in Fadtala, full benefits of forest protection in terms of greater availability of soil, water and forest produce would only be gained if they too began to protect their forests. The stream in Attha had begun to go dry in summer due to the heavy deforestation. Over a decade, by the early nineteen nineties the stream had become perennial once again. The uniqueness of this forest conservation effort is its reliance on the traditional labour pooling customs of the Bhils. These customs had begun to decay due to the inroads of the monetary economy and the destruction of the natural resource base of the Bhils. However, under Daheli’s leadership the women of Attha formed groups of five or six women and began patrolling the forest to ensure that they were not grazed and the root stock was allowed to regenerate. Thereafter they made sure that the new trees were not cut. The grass would be cut only after the monsoons and distributed equally among the protecting families to be used as fodder for cattle. The women of Attha, emboldened by their success, then began another conservation activity. The small teams that had been formed began working in groups on the farms of their members to plug the gullies in between their hilly farms with stones so as to catch the soil and some of the water that was being washed off their farms by rain. Over a period of a decade and a half since the mid nineteen nineties hundreds of such gully plugs have been constructed leading to the creation of many small plots of land with deep soil adding to the productivity of the village. This practice too has been replicated in many other villages in Alirajpur. The women of Kakrana village on the banks of the River Narmada have shown exemplary courage in protecting their forests. Since they are on the border of Alirajpur district they have to contend with continuous efforts by poachers to steal their timber. Finally they had to take the decision that someone would have to stay permanently in the forest itself so that she could give an alarm call whenever poachers arrived. Raija Bai and her husband Dilu decided to take up this challenge and they built their hut in the forest itself and they live their alone with their children. “I have spent a decade in this hut in the forest and since I came here I have had a better life than when I was in the village,” says Raija Bai when asked about the hazards of living alone in the forest. The villagers of Jhandana, Sugat, Kakrana and Chameli initially had trouble protecting another forest that was situated on the hills on the borders of their village. However, after much fighting they were able to resolve their differences with the help of members of the KMCS from other villages and today this forest too is resplendent and visible from a long distance as the hills in front of it are barren because villagers not owing allegiance to the KMCS have not protected them. Collective action by the community for forest, soil and water conservation is the only sustainable way in which the productivity of fragile eco-systems in hilly, semi-arid and hard rock regions of the country can be ensured. The first ever woman awardee of The Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics this year, Elinor Ostrom, has been honoured precisely for her theoretical and empirical work in establishing the validity of communitarian collective action for sustainable natural resource management, thus putting the imprimatur on the exemplary work being done by the women of the KMCS in Alirajpur.

A biting cold morning in the winter of 1996 saw a Bhil tribal woman lying naked shivering on the earth floor of her ramshackle hut in village Rajna in Barwah tehsil of Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh. Beside her also shivering, lay a shriveled new born baby. The woman had so lain for the whole night and her ordeal hadn’t ended. There was a twin yet to be born but for the last three hours there had been no movement from within and so the baby was stuck inside the womb. The earth beneath the woman was wet with blood and placental fluid but neither she nor the dai (the traditional birth attendant) seemed to be least bothered. Just then the mobile dispensary of the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust happened to pass by and was stopped by the people in the village. There were five nurses but they expressed their inability to help as they did not have any instruments. When the villagers beseeched them to take the woman and the baby to the Primary Health Centre (PHC) at Barwah they pleaded their inability saying they were on their way to different villages to administer vaccines under the Pulse Polio immunisation programme. Sometime later a jeep came along with a doctor from the PHC at Barwah. The villagers stopped this jeep too. The doctor also after seeing the woman said that he was helpless as he did not have any instruments with him. He too advanced the responsibilities of supervision of the Pulse Polio programme as an excuse for not taking the woman to Barwah. He even went to the extent of saying that the lives of thousands of children were at stake and he could not put them at risk for the sake of one woman and child. Eventually the husband of the woman had to borrow money from a moneylender at an exorbitant interest rate and hire a jeep to take her to Barwah. The woman just about survived but her twin babies died. Later tests revealed that the woman had a haemoglobin count of just 4 grams per decilitre dangerously below the ideal level of 12 or above. This incident forced a rethinking of the way in which the problems regarding the reproductive health of Bhil tribal women were being addressed by the Kasturba Trust. The mobile clinic of the Kasturba Trust had a qualified doctor and two nurses and a rudimentary dispensary and used to pay a visit to the villages in the area three days a week. In addition it had provided training from time to time to thirteen dais of the area in safe delivery practices and basic medicine and used to give them a monthly stipend of a hundred rupees. The sordid experience of the Bhil woman in Rajna showed that the achievement of health, which according to the World Health Organisation means a state of complete mental, physical and social well being and especially reproductive health for poor adivasi women would require much more than what was being done by the Kasturba Trust. An epochal milestone had been reached just prior to this in the field of women’s reproductive health and rights with the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994. There for the first time the reproductive rights of women were internationally recognised. Thence forward population control policies, which targeted women as objects without any decision-making powers of their own were rejected (Boland et al, 1994). This process was further reinforced at the International Women’s Conference held at Beijing in 1995. There the importance of women enjoying their sexuality for the achievement of complete reproductive and sexual health too got recognition for the first time in an international forum despite some stiff opposition from religious fundamentalists. Thereafter women’s empowerment and the establishment of reproductive and sexual rights became the key issues in the ensuring of reproductive health for women. So much so that the Indian Government too jettisoned its earlier sterilisation target based population control programme in favour of a reproductive health and rights approach. The stress therefore was on organising women to demand their rights as a means to achieving good health. Women’s health, however, is a much more complex issue than just the provision of adequate healthcare services. It has come to be recognised that women’s health, safe motherhood, population control, and poverty alleviation are all dependent on women having reproductive health rights apart from economic and political rights at par with men in a society that is egalitarian in all respects (Correa & Pechinsky, 1994). Thus the basic requirements for improving the health status of women are a direct multi-pronged attack on poverty through the creation of labour intensive work opportunities, removal of social inequalities of all kinds, a campaign against traditional and modern myths and a comprehensive community health care system with primary and referral services (Quadeer, 1995). So any programme aimed at improving the health status of poor adivasi women has to necessarily incorporate both the service delivery and the mass organisational approaches to community work if it has to be successful. The primary cause of ill health in women is their low status in society. Relegated to a position of subordination from the moment of birth, girls eat last and least, are over-worked and under-educated and have to bear children from an early age. They receive inadequate medical treatment when ill and are often passed over for immunisation. Despite the biologically proven fact that women have a longer lifespan than men, in reality, in India the reverse is true in rural areas where more girls are likely to die than boys leading to a sex ratio skewed against women in the population. Adult women lack property rights and control over economic resources, which contributes to the general preference for a male offspring as an insurance against old age incapability. This in turn results in women having to go through the rigours of repeated pregnancies and childbirths to produce sufficient male children that can survive through to adulthood overcoming the uncertainties of an insecure childhood. Malnutrition, lack of sexual hygiene, repeated pregnancies and overwork lead to most rural women being anaemic and so prone to other diseases in general (Mehta & Abouzahr, 1993) The prevailing pattern of development has been particularly harsh on women. Destruction of resource bases has led to the workload increasing with a corresponding decrease in nutritional levels of the food intake. The introduction of artificial input mechanised agriculture has deprived women of the little control that they had over production processes in traditional agriculture and further reinforced patriarchal power relations. Forced migration either temporary or permanent has exposed women to sexual violence in unfamiliar surroundings. The loss of traditional livelihoods has been accompanied by the induction of women into low-paid jobs in the informal sector where the work environment is unhealthy and the workload high. The general level of violence in society has gone up, to further sequester women in their homes thus reducing employment opportunities. All this has had a negative impact on the health of these women (Duvvury, 1994). Last but in no way the least harmful have been the government’s health and population control policies. Primary health care has received short shrift both in terms of financial outlays and in terms of the introduction of participative health care systems. Thus apart from the foreign funded immunisation campaigns like the Pulse Polio programme mentioned above, rural populations rarely ever receive any effective healthcare from government health services (Bose & Desai, 1983). Consequently for the poor infant mortality levels are still dangerously high as are maternal mortality and morbidity levels (IIPS, 2007). Again spurred on by the neo-Malthusian myth that population growth is responsible for poverty the government had launched an aggressive population control programme in the 1970s, which targeted women for sterilisations and the use of various unsafe and unhealthy contraception measures (Mamdani, 1973). Even though with the introduction of the sterilisation target free reproductive health approach from 1996 onwards there had ostensibly been a so called paradigm shift at the policy level in population control and maternal and child health care, the ground reality in rural areas had remained much the same as before (Rahul, 1997c). Thus the achievement of health, like any other social attribute, is primarily dependent on the urgency with which people seek it. The Bhil adivasi women are too burdened by the multiple oppressions enumerated above to be able to seek anything at all let alone health. Thus the focus of the reproductive health programme of the Trust too shifted towards the organisation of women from just the provision of health services. The main problem with organising women is that the deep-rooted patriarchy in rural societies prevents women from coming out of their homes. In most cases patriarchy has been internalised by the women themselves thus making it difficult to make a beginning in organising them by focussing on patriarchal oppression alone. Specifically in the sphere of reproductive health, moreover, there exists an intimidating culture of silence (Dixon-Mueller & Wasserheit, 1991). Nevertheless, the health of women being an issue that affects everyone it is relatively easier to get the acquiescence of the men to let their women do something about improving it. Thus both felt-need wise and strategically health provides an ideal entry point for organising poor adivasi women and helping them create a space of their own in society. So an attempt was made to start the organisation process in Barwah tehsil with an effort at opening up this dark and forbidden area. Weeks were spent in visiting the villages and going from house to house to talk to the women. A whole day was spent in Chainpura village going to the houses and the fields where they were working to talk to the women and call them to the meeting to be held in the evening. Only five women came to attend. The women listened silently as the conversation was directed gradually towards reproductive health. Initially this did not draw much of a response. Then when specific problems like white discharge from the vagina, leucorrhea, were mentioned, one woman said that she was suffering from it as well as back pain. Another revealed that she had a slight prolapse of the uterus at times when she did hard work. It was decided to hold a bigger meeting on a later occasion. The village Golanpati, which is about six kilometres away, is picturesquesly set on the banks of the Kanar river in a depression surrounded by hills at the foot of the escarpment of the Vindhya hills descending from the Malwa Plateau. It is unfortunately without any electricity. Consequently most of the men and the young unmarried women were away labouring on the fields of rich farmers atop the Malwa plateau to earn the money needed to buy diesel for running their engine driven pumps with which to irrigate their winter crops. A death of a close relative had taken place in a village some distance away from where most of the young wives of Golanpati hailed and so they too were absent. So time was spent in desultory conversation about various things and after some time some of the women decided to go fishing in the Kanar river with small nets called “dahwalia”. The people of the area are able to supplement their normal simple diet with such occasional infusions of rich fish protein. The village Akya too was without electricity at that time though later efforts have brought it onto the electrification map. It is situated on the banks of the Sukhri stream. Here the people had already arranged for the diesel and were busy in the fields irrigating the standing crop of wheat and gram. Once again the day was spent visiting the women in their houses and fields. The houses here are all on the farms of the respective people and so scattered over a distance of some three kilometres. In the evening upwards of thirty women attended the meeting. The meeting went off well. As many as twenty-three women reported various kinds of reproductive health problems and demanded that something be done to relieve their sufferings. The women complained that local quacks only gave them injections, which did not relieve their pains or suggested that they get their uteruses removed. The government health worker rarely visited the village. The villages Okhla and Chandupura are adjacent and for all practical purposes are like two hamlets of the same village. The district administration, however, displaying typical bureaucratic perversity has put the two villages in two separate panchayat clusters. These villages are lucky to have electricity because there is a Hanuman temple in Okhla where the epic Ramayan has been recited day and night continuously for the past twenty-five years. Even though the adivasis and their Gods hold no value for the government the same is obviously not true when it comes to Hindu Gods and their devotees. The people here too were busy with their agricultural operations. The people here have been enterprising enough to draw water over great lengths from the river Kanad using electric pumps and PVC pipes. Here during the initial house visits one woman in Chandupura said she could get all the women together in a jiffy if she was given a share of the pickings from the project being planned for them! Here for the first time women brought up the behaviour and attitudes of their men for discussion. The lust and violence of their men fuelled by alcoholism they felt was the main deterrent to achieving a healthy status. A health clinic in which specialist doctors could diagnose their problems would be immensely beneficial they felt. There are in these two villages, in addition to adivasis, dalits also. The next set of villages has mixed populations and is dominated by upper caste people. Limbi is a village of Jats. These are a farmer caste, which had come here originally from the state of Rajasthan. They owned most of the land in the village on which the dalit and adivasi people worked as labourers. Here there was a pretty good meeting among the poorer people where most of the problems identified in the earlier villages came to the fore once again. The Jat women were prepared to talk individually but none of them came to a meeting, which was organised separately for them. There was one Jat woman who had lost her mental balance because she could not bear the mounting pressure on her to produce a male child after repeated births of girls. There is another woman who was tricked into marrying a doddering old Jat in his seventies. The old man had died later and she had been left to make a living on her own with a small girl of five and some land. Mundla is another village dominated this time by a different farmer caste, the Dangis. These people too own most of the land in the village and make the adivasis and dalit people work for paltry wages as low as Rupees twenty a day which is less than half the statutory minimum wage. Here the men instead of the women attended the evening meeting. The men listened and went on saying “Ha bahenji, Sach Bahenji” – yes sister, true sister, but did not make any comments of their own when they were told that they should be more considerate of the health of their women. Even though they promised to send their women to the repeat meeting to be held in the morning no one came then either. The village of Palsud is situated between these two villages and the villagers there, some dalits and some adivasis, are continually troubled by the Jats and the Dangis. There have been murderous fights and two dalits from Palsud are serving a life sentence in Indore jail for having murdered a Jat from Limbi. The women in this village enthusiastically took part in the meeting and talked about their reproductive health problems quite freely. There are two other villages Bargana and Barkhera nearby but in both of these the meetings drew only four or five women each. One of these women a Jat went around wearing a cloth belt around her loins to prevent her uterus from coming out. She would have liked to have a hysterectomy but did not trust the private doctors in Sanawad where most of the other women had got themselves operated. In the local dialect this is referred to as the “burra operation” to distinguish it from the sterilisation operation which is called just “operation” and is done free by the government doctors as part of the family planning programme. Another phenomenon was that of women’s vaginal opening having become so extended from repeated childbirths that when they get up from a squatting position air is sucked into the vagina and then ejected with an embarrassingly loud sound when they sit down again. The last set of villages is in a cluster on the banks of the Choral river. The villages of Aronda and Kundia lie to the west of the river while the villages of Sendhwa and Karondia lie to the east. In Sendhwa village the Brahmins and Patidars who are higher up in the caste order do not let the dalits draw water from the public hand pump and the latter have to drink water from the Choral River. Consequently during the monsoons there is an annual epidemic of waterborne diseases among these people and in 1995 there were three deaths due to gastro-enteritis. Here too the meetings were sparsely attended but the women who did come all complained of reproductive health problems and of the the insensitivity of their men. The upsarpanch was a Muslim who as a community are notorious for their anti-women attitudes. The upsarpanch’s wife herself suffered from anaemia with a haemoglobin count as low as 6 grams per decilitre despite their being quite well off economically. She spoke about her problems individually but did not come to the meeting. Katkut village is located roughly at the geographical centre of this area and by virtue of being the weekly marketplace and also having a civil dispensary, banks, the forest range office and a police outpost it is also the commercial and administrative centre. It is a peculiar village. It is dominated by the Jats and the sarpanch at that time in 1996 was a Jat woman. The husband of the woman operated in her name. The Jats of Katkut are held in low esteem by their caste men from other villages because of their arrogant and boorish behaviour and the men find it difficult to get brides. One young Jat woman complained that she repeatedly aborted and would like to know whether there was any solution. She was the only daughter-in-law in a house of four sons. There was no father-in-law who had died very early. The mother-in-law Karmabai fought a long legal battle with her brothers and gained possession of her share of her father’s land. She was a panch in the panchayat. She said that the Jat women were extremely oppressed and it was not possible to get anything done in their interest given the attitude of the men. This area is just fifty kilometers away from the city of Indore. Yet the women here regardless of whether they are from relatively well off households or from the extremely poor adivasi and dalit ones, are uniformly oppressed by various forms of patriarchal oppression. The general reluctance of women to talk about their reproductive health problems in a women’s group was initially very puzzling. Finally Ramanbai of Chandupura provided the answer. She said that in her village there was tremendous infighting among the different families over various issues. There was a lot of backbiting. So, women did not want to reveal their illnesses, the public knowledge of which could be used against them. Consequently, even if individually they would talk freely about their problems, often women refused to come to the meetings. So getting women to come together to discuss health problems turned out to be a tough nut to crack. But the women that did come insistently demanded that arrangements should be made for proper medical attention to their reproductive health problems by gynaecologists as the gynaecologist in the PHC in Barwah had never set foot in these remote adivasi areas. So, a few reproductive health camps were organised in which gynaecologists from Indore attended to the women. A major revelation after these camps was that many women do not take the medicines prescribed to them. Some women had orally taken the vaginal tablets for curing leucorrhea given to them for insertion in their vagina. Another woman had kept the vaginal tablets safely wrapped up in cloth in her private box because the doctor had just told her to keep it ‘inside’ without mentioning the Hindi word for vagina. So the woman had assumed that the tablets were some kind of totem and kept them in her box instead of inserting them into her vagina. Inquiries revealed that this carelessness or reluctance in taking medicines regularly was quite common. Many of the women came to the camps with the expectation that the big doctors from Indore would give them injections of special miraculous medicines which would immediately cure them of their problems. One woman in Okhla, Suraj, even went to the extent of saying that she did not trust the medicines and the workers of the Trust. She had gone for the check-up to see what kind of treatment was being given. She was extremely upset when the workers repeatedly went to her house every week to see whether she was taking the medicines. “Mujhe aise lafde nahin chahiye, mere naam tumhari chopdi se kat do”(I do not want to get into such trouble so please remove my name from your register) she said irascibly. Thus despite all the rhetoric and policies of women’s empowerment and the hype around the Janani Suraksha Yojana and National Rural Health Mission in recent years there is still a deep lack of appreciation in the public health system of the tremendous socio-cultural barriers to ensuring the overall reproductive health of poor women. The focus is solely on safe motherhood and the more persistent gynaecological problems that women suffer as manifestations of patriarchal oppression are not addressed at all. Consequently the stark reality that prevails even today in Bhil tribal areas in western Madhya Pradesh is that the women suffer from severe neglect both from their families and from the society and government. Truly these women are the neglected of the earth. References Boland, R et al (1994): Honouring Human Rights in Population Policies: From Declaration to Action in Sen et al eds op cit. Bose, A & Desai, P B (1983): Studies in Social Dynamics of Primary Health Care, Hindustan Publishing, Delhi. Correa, S & Petchinsky, R (1994): Reproductive and Sexual Rights: A Feminist Perspective in Sen, G et al eds op cit. Dixon-Mueller, R & Wasserheit, J (1991): The Culture of Silence: Reproductive Tract Infections among Women in the Third World, International Women’s Health Coalition, New York. Duvvury, N (1994): Gender Implications of New Economic Policies and the Health Sector, Paper presented in the National Seminar on the World Development Report 1993, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. IIPS (2007): National Family Health Survey III 2005, International Institute of Population Sciences, Mumbai. Mamdani, Y H (1973): The Myth of Population Control: Family, Caste and Class in an Mehta, S & Abouzahr, C (1993): Safe Motherhood and Women’s Status in Krishna, U R et al eds, Safe Motherhood, Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India. Quadeer, I (1995): Women and Health: A Third World Perspective, Lokayan Bulletin, Vol. 12 Nos. 1& 2 Rahul (1997): Target Free but not Oppression Free, Free Press Daily 24th March, Indore.

The police in India normally use their power to implicate people in false court cases and arrest them to terrorise the common people at large. The police have been long used by the administration and the upper-caste non-adivasis to subjugate the poor and illiterate tribals. Any tribal who dared to protest invariably used to be beaten up and a false case used to be registered against him. When the Bhil women of Western Madhya Pradesh began an organised movement to stop illegal sale of liquour the police typically implicated them in false cases. The women took a stand of not allowing the police into arresting them and thus made an authoritative statement in defence of the right of the poor downtrodden people of the area. For quite some time false criminal cases had been lodged against both the male and female members of the Bhil tribal organisations whenever they had agitated either for access to the forests or to prevent the sale of alcohol or when they staged a sit-in in front of the police station. Subsequently the judicial magistrate too instead of releasing the accused on bail invariably misused his judicial discretion to send them to jail. From the beginning the policy of the organisation members had been to refuse to be arrested. This finally forced the police to conduct raids to arrest people in which they were mildly successful but had to desist in the face of opposition, which could escalate into a major confrontation. The organisation members then took the decision to court arrest voluntarily and launch a “jail bharo” or fill the jails agitation to show the administration that they were not afraid of going to jail. So along with seven other accused women I finally courted arrest and went to jail refusing to take bail. Subsequently I went on a hunger strike in jail from 11th January 1998 as a last resort stating that as a dalit woman I did not find any substance in the guarantees to life and liberty enshrined in the Constitution of India and so preferred death in jail instead. My demand was that the arrested members of the organisation be released on personal bonds from jail, all the false cases lodged against the members of the organisation be withdrawn and the right of the adivasis to stage peaceful demonstrations be restored. The rest of the members of the organisation who were outside remained active during this period taking out a massive rally in support of the struggle of those inside jail in Barwah town on 13th January 1998 and then launching a sit-in in front of the Divisional Commissioner’s Office in Indore city to demand the transfer of the District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police of Khargone district. The administration had on that occasion given an assurance that three false cases would be withdrawn and no further victimisation of tribals would take place in future. The Superintendent and District Magistrate were also transferred at the behest of the Election Commission and I broke my fast after eleven days. However, the administration reneged on its promise of withdrawing the false cases and this forced these women to take the drastic step of launching a mass hunger strike. Eighteen Bhil women went on an indefinite hunger strike from 2nd June 1998 to press their demands for a more just livelihood and a repression free existence for the tribals of Barwah tehsil. Apart from demanding an end to police repression and the withdrawal of false cases lodged against them these women also demanded that adequate health services be provided and action be taken against the exploitative practices of the non-adivasi people of the area. The police administration was particularly obstinate in refusing to change its repressive ways. The reason was that the organisation had effectively put a spanner into the corrupt and repressive functioning of the lower level police functionaries. The previous Superintendent of Police of Khargone district had categorically stated that he could not tolerate the fact that his staff should be scared of the organised power of the tribal women. So there was no response at all from the local administration. The strike was eventually ended on 10th June 1998 after receiving an assurance from the National Human Rights Commission that an independent enquiry would be conducted into the complaints of human rights violations made to it by the tribal women. However, even after that the cases were not withdrawn. What price the hunger strike then as an action strategy for bringing the modern state to heel. Hunger strikes have some chance of succeeding in crunch situations only when those practising it are in very large numbers and so convinced about their cause and the philosophy of passive resistance as to be able to exert moral pressure and bring about a change of heart in the oppressor. This requires a very strong moral fibre which most ordinary mortals lack. So even during India’s freedom movement when there was such a groundswell of mass protest against the British, Gandhians could rarely achieve their immediate demands let alone win freedom through hunger strikes. Of the many hunger strikes before independence the most famous instance of such an action ending in the death of the faster was that of Jatindranath Das who was ironically not a Gandhian but a bomb making expert who had been jailed for armed militancy against the British along with the great martyr Bhagat Singh for their part in the Lahore bomb conspiracy of 1928. He had demanded along with Bhagat Singh that they be recognised as political prisoners and better facilities be provided in Lahore jail to the prisoners. His demands were not met and he died after sixty-three days of fasting in 1929. Das’s death resulted in a massive hue and cry and the British had to constitute an enquiry team. The team found a lot of lacunae in the jail administration and suggested reforms, which were then undertaken. But this was a small demand compared to the demand for independence, which was finally gained only after the burgeoning mass struggles during and after World War II brought home to the British the realisation that it would be far wiser to hand over power in a smooth transition within a colonial constitutional framework that the British themselves had prepared instead of risk that it be ceased by militant nationalists. Thus the success of a hunger strike in securing an important and radical demand hinges crucially on the hunger striker going on to bear death and the demand being supported by a substantial and organised mass base. In my case and later in the case of the women we had no intention of bearing death and we went on a hunger strike with the limited goal of publicising our problems to the larger world and so withdrew our hunger strike on some small demands being met. Personally this experience of the hunger strike brought about a major shift in my life. It became clear to me that class and patriarchal oppression were deep rooted in Indian society and it required deeper political understanding to fight it. I had started off as a creche worker after somehow passing my high school examinations in search of a job to escape my grinding poverty. So I had had no formal training in social science and philosophy to be able to understand the books on complicated political theory that I began to read to improve my political understanding. This made me decide to enroll for a distance education degree course in political science along with my field work. It took me seven years to complete the degree course because my basic foundations were very weak and I also had to work in the field and bear a baby and care for him during this time. I have continued to study ever since and finished a masters course in social work and am now enrolled in an M.Phil course as a stepping stone to finally doing my Phd in the same way as the great feminist historian Gerda Lerner.

Suguna Solanki is a Bhil tribal anganwadi or creche helper under the Integrated Child Development Scheme of the Government, residing in the Jeet Nagar slum in Indore city in Madhya Pradesh. She is a versatile person as she also works as a part time health worker for an NGO and has along with some other anganwadi workers registered an NGO of their own. When asked what motivated her to become so active she says, “Once, a few years ago, I took a 16 year old unmarried girl from our slum to a quack doctor for an abortion when she was five months pregnant. The quack gave her some potion to drink and also pressed her lower abdomen with his hands continuously and aborted the foetus. Later on after coming home she began bleeding profusely and then we had to be rush her to a government hospital where the doctors removed her uterus and somehow saved her. That made me think that just serving as an anganwadi worker was not enough”. This horrendous incident underlines the following serious obstacles that prevent poor urban slum women in Indore from successfully addressing their reproductive health problems – 1. A taboo on discussing reproductive health problems unless matters go out of control. 2. A taboo on discussing sexuality issues with adolescents leading to unwanted pregnancies among unmarried girls. 3. The lack of access to good and certified reproductive health treatment. The poor women living in slums in Indore have traditionally remained outside the purview of qualified medical help and it has mostly been left to NGOs to deliver what little service they can to them. The most important of such efforts was undertaken by the Urban Health Resource Centre, New Delhi (UHRC) with funding from USAID in collaboration with five local NGOs of Indore from 2003 onwards in 75 slums. The main thrust of this programme named the Environmental Health Programme (EHP) was on involving the community in the access of the government’s reproductive and child health services so as to improve the health of women and children and reduce the infant, child and maternal mortality rates. 87 Community Based Organisations (CBO) were formed in the slums and these were grouped together to form 9 Lead CBOs. Suguna along with a few other anganwari workers from nearby slums like Rekha Patode of Rajeev Gandhi Nagar, Ranjana Gangle of Bhavana Nagar, Urmila Javre of Pavanpuri were trained as para workers in reproductive and child health and given the task of mobilising the communities to seek better health services. Apart from creating reproductive health awareness among the slum women the NGOs also held monthly health camps in which doctors came and did check ups and provided medicines to the women. However, this programme following the general trend in India provided only help for maternal and child health and skirted the larger issue of reproductive and sexual rights of women and the way they are denied due to patrarchy. Rekha said, “Menstrual hygiene is a big problem for poor women as in most cases they wash and use the same cloth and they are not able to dry it properly due to taboos against public display of the cloth. So the cloth has to be dried secretly in the shade and this leads to various infections. Most women complain of white discharges and pelvic inflammation which come from lack of menstrual hygiene.” When the women para workers mooted this problem before their superiors in the NGOs they were gruffly told to ignore it as the solution was not easy. The para workers were frustrated by this rejection but then suddenly a fortuitous turn of events showed them a way out. The UHRC which was the coordinating NGO decreed that these field level health workers should be made to form an NGO of their own so that they would be able to carry on the work even after the project ended. Urmila says, “Seven of us women field workers were grouped together and helped to form and register an NGO by the name of Parivar Sahayog Samiti (PSS) under the Madhya Pradesh Societies Act. We were given training on how to run it and we told the trainer about our desire to work on women’s reproductive rights against the prevailing patriarchy”. The trainer relayed this to the bosses in UHRC and so the monthly health camps were reoriented towards treating gynaecological diseases and a plan was made to supply cheap sanitary napkins to the women. The first monthly camp held on these lines got a tremendous response from the women as for the first time they were properly examined in adequate privacy by gynaecologists and given appropriate medication. The medication helped tremendously as did the use of the sanitary napkins and within a space of three months there was tremendous improvement in the health of the women especially in the cure of white discharge and pelvic inflammation which are a persistent complaint of most poor women. Suguna and her colleagues were very enthused with this success but the happy state of affairs did not last for long. The funding for the EHP stopped in 2009 and their jobs as para health workers came to an end. Simultaneously a male manager in the NGO for which they were working tried to take over their own NGO, PSS, which had some Rs 70,000.00 odd deposited in it from their salaries. They fought with the manager under the leadership of their chairperson Chandrakala Porwal who says, “The manager used to look after the accounts and the administrative paperwork of our NGO and he threatened us that he would get our registration revoked. At first we were scared that all our savings would go but then we got legal opinion from another NGO worker and have taken all the papers and the bank account in our control.” All this just shows how difficult it is for poor women to improve their reproductive health on a sustained basis. Asked as to what they propose to do now Suguna says, “We have heard that someone in Tamil Nadu in South India has invented a cheap sanitary napkin making machine that can be bought for about Rs one lakh and that small NGOs are buying these machines and selling the napkins for as low as Rs one a piece. Lakhs of women have benefited from this already. We will try and get funding from some agency and buy one of these machines and continue our work.”

My brothers took the decision, after my father’s death, to divide the family land between themselves and leave me out. So I wrote a letter to my brothers saying that I wanted to take an equal share of the land. But they didn’t reply. After some time I gave them a legal notice and then filed a case in court under the provisions of the inheritance law. This case was filed in 1994 and it took around 5 years for the court to decide in my favour and send a notice to the village council. My brothers defied the court’s decision with the connivance of the patriarchal village council. I then phoned the secretary to the Chief Minister in Bhopal giving details of my land case and he ordered the magistrate who had decided the case to see that the land was given to me. In this process I was alone and it was a difficult time as I could not share my problems with any body because every one was opposing me. After one week the magistrate and the village council members gathered in the village and called my brothers and told them that if they obstructed the division of land then the police would take them into custody. We went to our land and I got my share in the presence of the officials and police. This was the first time that a woman in my community had fought and got a share of the ancestral land.

Kansari is the Goddess symbolised by the cereal Jowar or sorghum which is the staple food of the Bhil Adivasis of Western Madhya Pradesh. The Bhils have a creation myth about how the universe was created and in it there is a paean to Kansari as Jowar is such an important part of their life.

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This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.