Kavitha Hushare is explaining how to make home-made tonic using drumstick ( Moringa oleifera ) leaves. Sitting among a group of women in Yakatpur village, she speaks about the benefits of the plant that is rich in vitamins and other nutrients.
She tells them how the leaves, dried in shade, and mixed with jaggery and some common dry fruits, can be kept without refrigeration, for a year. It should be given to children, teenage girls and lactating mothers as a food supplement, she says.
Don’t believe in myths such as “Nuggi Gida Nuggi Haktade” (drumstick trees destroys your family). They were spread by people with an unscientific bent of mind. No need to believe them, she says. She cautions that she will come back a month later, to check if they have been following her advice.
This is one of the many sessions that she holds with women across the district round the year. She has trained over 1,750 women from minority communities in various skills and exposed them to the working of the panchayat raj bodies so that they could make excellent rural leaders. Enthused by her efficiency, the Union Social Justice Ministry has funded these trainings under the Nai Roshni scheme.
However, Ms. Hushare did not start by being a women’s right activist. She founded the non-government organisation, Sahayog, with some friends, two decades ago to take up mainstream social service. That was by accident, she said.
“I was fresh out of college and wanted a job. I joined as an office staff of a Hyderabad-based NGO. It closed the Bidar branch after the project was completed. I started Sahayog with my friends Shafi Ahmed, S. Sharanappa and others. We began by training Bidri artisans and urging farmers to take up watershed development. But once I began promoting self-help groups in the late 1990s, then I began to see the results of women empowerment and how our society was hungry for it,” she said.
Since then, she became one of the few voices of women in backward Hyderabad Karnataka. She regularly mediates in families with domestic issues and helps abused women get justice by accompanying them to police stations or by working with the District Legal Services Authority.
She says being an activist and taking on patriarchy on a daily basis has not been fun. “My life is not like that of those who hold candlelight vigils in the cities. I have been fighting three prejudices — of being born in a poor, landless Dalit family, of working in a field dominated by men and of remaining unmarried. I don’t think this fight will end any day soon,” she laughs. She helped her six siblings get settled after her father died young. She built a home and now cares for her aged mother. All this was done during breaks from work, she said.
