A National Consultation on Agrarian Single Women recently focussed on issues of distress, access to livelihood and services. The consultation, a meeting ground of intellectuals, academicians, grassroots activists, rural single women, and widows, examined the larger issues of agrarian crisis and the unabated farmer suicides. In the micro context, they focussed on differential entitlements within the family coupled with institutional discrimination in terms of access to basic services, deliverables and schemes available to poor rural widows and single women.
The Minister for Rural Development, who was present at the consultation, heard testimonies from the women themselves. Women narrated how their fundamental “Right to life” was at stake. They said that not only were their economic, social and cultural rights (right to work, housing, land, health, education) violated, their civil rights were also denied. All this, they said, was coupled with gender-based violence, which they faced within the family and in the public sphere as well.
The testimonies revealed that wherever single rural women raised their voices, they were likely to be labelled as witches, traitors, agents of social and cultural divisiveness. Due to such perceptions and traditional prejudices, their livelihoods faced constant peril, leading to more victimisation, isolation and ultimately destitution.
The consultation revealed there was little or no data available on the plight faced by single rural women even though whatever little data was available showed that women were affected by rural distress. Almost all the papers presented had a common element — double discrimination, deprivations, denial of access to resources and right to life.
Among the poor, rural single women were found to be the poorest, more vulnerable and more adversely affected by poverty than men. The incidence of poverty was on the rise either due to agrarian distress or due to low demand in agricultural labour which was an outcome of the mechanized forms of agricultural production. In addition, the dismal performance of the rural non-farm sector in terms of generating employment, the greater attractiveness and lure of certain urban centres of development – thanks to neo-liberal urbanisation - an increase in rural to urban migration had imposed larger burdens on women left behind in rural areas to fend for themselves.
Papers presented on the occasion pointed out that in the post-liberalisation period, production, productivity and incomes had stagnated, paving the way for greater agrarian distress. Farmer suicides in some of the better-off states like Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Punjab and parts of Tamil Nadu were grim pointers to the crisis within. This had additionally resulted in an increase in the number of asset-less farmers, widows and women headed households. Single women as Internally Displaced Persons in conflict zones faced double institutional discrimination as they were targeted by insurgents as well as the general public. Here, they often experienced a disproportionate degree of discrimination, intolerance, and abuse, caught as they were between conflicting groups and neglect by the state.
It was found that single women, widows and senior citizens did not have access to private health insurance. They were also often excluded from state-funded schemes as they did not contribute to any such scheme during their working lives. Besides, their gender-specific physical and mental health condition tended to be overlooked by research, academic studies and public policy. The consultation threw up some revealing facts, including that 89.3 per cent of households did not have access to any formal source of credit, and financial exclusion was most acute with 64 per cent of women from the central, eastern and north-eastern regions of the country.
According to the 2012 Census, there are 39.8 million single women in India. Unwilling to rely on charitable impulses of family and society, single poor rural women — comprising the most vulnerable 10 per cent of the female population — are demanding public attention and policy to live a life of dignity and self-respect.
sunila.singh@hotmail.com
