2022’s International Women’s Day on March 8, celebrates the theme of ‘Breaking the Bias’. The idea seeks to not only discuss but challenge the stigmatising biases that hinder women empowerment in the twenty-first century. Still, in light of all that has happened in the last two to three years, the theme may very well celebrate the milestones achieved by Indian women in face of a global pandemic.

History may remember the time between 2019-end to 2022 as the Covid-19 pandemic years. In India, it was also when the Migrant Crisis struck the country even as the Farmers’ Movement came into its own. However, amidst all these challenges, it is the women who have played a mammoth role in keeping healthcare and society in general afloat. From urban working women to rural farmers, ASHAs, anganwadi workers and more, women took the forefront during a global pandemic to ensure that their and their families’ right to health is protected.

Particularly, the Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) were crucial in controlling the spread of the virus. They have also repeatedly raised their voices against inadequate facilities. Despite the lack of a proper PPE kit or masks from the administration, the workers across India visited villages and houses to check on home-isolated patients. They also informed the rural public about preventative measures against Covid-19, playing a pivotal role in keeping the virus from spreading further in villages.

Around 9 lakh ASHAs helped the government notify the spread of Covid-19 to villages. Of these, 42,000 ASHAs in Karnataka carried out a Covid-19 vulnerability mapping survey of 1.59 crore households. Yet in return the administration fails to acknowledge them as government workers, preferring to call them frontline workers. Many of these workers suffered from Covid-19 themselves but did not receive government help.

“We ASHAs only have an asha [hope] now that the government will attend to our concerns. We get around ₹ 2,500 as monthly payment. It should be increased and given to us promptly,” an ASHA from Maharashtra told SabrangIndia.

Similarly, Anganwadi workers shared the brunt of reaching nutrition packages and ration packages to families during Covid-19. However, even in March 2022 they report infrequent payment of their meagre wages. With lockdown announcements, they had already lost contact with children but their duties still continued.

Both these communities, dubbed frontline workers, are an important part of India’s healthcare, especially in rural areas. This fact especially shone through during Covid-19 when experts approached ASHAs and Anganwadi employees for ground-level data rather than government offices.

Finally, tired of waiting for their dues, the women, who include many widows, took to protests and demanded their dues from the government. Around September 2021, ASHA workers called for a national campaign to demand better wages, recognition as government employees working in healthcare and proper medical gear.

Even so, months later, they continue to work in the same conditions, waiting for remuneration for transport, food and water while attending to their duties. During the election period, these women were put on polling duty checking people’s temperature, guiding them to their booths and similar work. In exchange for all this, the women continue to demand appropriate wages for the time and strength put in.

“A person should be paid according to the work they put in. Not less,” said an anganwadi worker on election-duty.

The resilience of these rural frontline workers is matched by another group of rural trailblazers – women farmers. The community was a prominent part of the farmers’ movement from its beginning around September 2020. Although the Chief Justice of India allegedly made a sexist comment about the presence of women in protest areas in January 2021, women had already moved to Delhi borders long before along with other northern farmers. Over the course of the year-long protests, farmer leaders organised multiple Mahila Kisan Diwas to highlight the role of women in the agriculture sector.

Although, the gender inequality can still be seen in the leadership of the farmer movement, the women leaders working at the district and tehsil-level clarified that they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the men when working in the fields. This comment came from an Adivasi woman farmer leader in Maharashtra, who condemned the CJI’s comment.

Since then, women have managed all farmer protest stages on Mahila Kisan Diwas. They arranged for morchas and assemblies and spoke to leaders at the local-level. By August 2, 2021, farmers reported their first woman martyr, 86-year-old activist Rajinder Kaur. She fell ill at the Singhu border after travelling there from Muhawa village in Amritsar, Punjab. While Rajinder did not own any land, she still voiced her solidarity with farmers. On October 28 of the same year, three women farmers died near Tikri border in Bahadurgarh after being hit by a speeding dumper truck.

These were among the many peasants that were sitting at Delhi borders for nearly a year. On top of successfully getting the laws repealed, the vocal and visual protests of women farmers also highlighted how more than half of agricultural employees in India are women. By doing so, farmers have already broken the bias relating to male dominance in the farming sector.

The historic struggle showed how women’s efforts are often disregarded as house work when in fact, it accounts for a major chunk of the labour strength.

Although farmers left Delhi borders in December 2021, the movement continues. Vocal dissent shown by women dissenters like women farmers, protesting ASHAs or anganwadi workers (who continue to voice grievances in Delhi) and even Shaheen Bagh women protesters, who condemned the CAA-NPR-NRC process in 2019, inspire more women to voice their anger.

The dissent continues nowadays from Muslim girls in Karnataka, who protested the communal violence demanding a ban on hijab in classrooms. Although the High Court upheld its decision to ban all religious scarves inside educational institutions that follow CDC guidelines, repeated protests by women effectively break the bias of the helpless women.

By demanding a legal guarantee to MSP, appropriate wages and professional recognition and assertion of basic freedom rights, these women continue the spirit of this year’s International Women’s Day.

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The post Women’s dissent: India’s feminist legacy appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A recent Karnataka High Court order granting anticipatory bail to a rape accused has taken sexual violence jurisprudence back by decades. In what can be termed as a substantially regressive rationale for giving bail to a rape accused which could affect the trial of the case, the court said that the fact that the complainant slept after the alleged crime is unbecoming of an Indian woman.

The accused was booked under charges of rape, cheating and criminal intimidation under the Indian penal Code (IPC) and under penal section of Information Technology Act under section 66B [Punishment for dishonestly receiving stolen computer resource].

The single judge bench of Justice Krishna Dixit in order dated June 22, considered the government pleader’s contention that the charges against the accused were serious and an offender like him should not be let out in the society. The court said that seriousness of the charges is not the only criteria to deny bail and whether there is prima facie case, also needs to be considered.

The court disbelieved the allegation of the complainant that she was subjected to rape on the false promise of marriage given that the accused presented a letter as proof whereby the complainant was ready to reach compromise to withdraw this case; also the court speculated why the complainant did not approach the court earlier when the accused was allegedly asking her for sexual favours.

Further, the court also questioned why the complainant went to her office at 11 pm; why she did not object to consumption of drinks (sic); why she allowed the accused to stay with her till morning. The court said that the complainant’s explanation that she fell asleep after the alleged crime is “unbecoming of a woman; that is not the way our women react when they are ravished”.

The court granted anticipatory bail to the accused on the principle of ‘granting of bail is rule and denial is exception’ as also keeping in mind the Covid-19 pandemic posing a threat to infection in prisons. When the pleader for the complainant contended that if granted bail it would be difficult to secure the accused person’s presence for investigation or trial, the court said it would levy stricter conditions.

The rape accused was thus granted pre arrest bail subject to the following conditions:

(i) petitioner shall execute a Personal Bond for a sum of Rs.1,00,000/- (Rupees one lakh) only with two sureties for the like sum;

(ii) petitioner shall cooperate in the investigation/further investigation at all times and appear before the jurisdictional police, if & when, so directed;

(iii) petitioner shall not leave the jurisdictional limits of the trial Court without its prior permission;

(iv) petitioner shall mark his attendance in the jurisdictional Police Station every second and fourth Saturday of the calendar month between 9.00 am and 3.00 pm;

(v) the petitioner shall not tamper the evidence or influence/deter the witnesses/victims; nor shall he do anything prejudicial to peace & order in the civil society;

(vi) it is open to the jurisdictional police or the complainant to seek cancellation of bail if & when petitioner commits breach of any of the above conditions or perpetrates any offence hereafter.

While considering whether there is prima facie case against the accused, the court has seemingly disregarded the complainant’s allegations in toto, based on extremely regressive and perilously patriarchal views. The bone of contention is not why the accused was granted bail but the rationale on which he was granted bail which is problematic. This order will not only adversely affect the trail in this case but it also sets a bad precedent for sexual violence jurisprudence.

The order can be read here.

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The post Falling asleep after ‘being ravished’, very unbecoming of an Indian woman: K’taka HC appeared first on SabrangIndia.

From a continuous sit-in at Shaheen Bagh to forming human chains around their fellow male protestors to ward off the police, women are leading the charge of India’s awakening and revolution. Yet, it is still commonplace for various male leaders to use, “Choodiyan pehen lo” (“Go wear bangles”) as a derogatory slur to talk down to other male opponents. The hands of women adorned in bangles, mehndi, smart watches, and FitBits, wielding laptops, cameras, milk bottles, or kitchen utensils, are much stronger than these misogynistic stereotypes.

The unpaid and unsaid labor of women has been glorified on every Women’s Day, deeming them Goddesses and bringers of life, so is India ready to see women who do not want to be put on a pedestal? Is India prepared for women who want their rights, and are willing to fight for them? And when I say women, I mean all women. Transwomen are women. Transwomen have been fighting very visibly against the discriminatory Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act as well as CAA/NRC that adversely affects transpersons and non-binary people.

Many Indians are quick to dismiss women empowerment with thin arguments like, “Go see the condition of women in Pakistan/Bangladesh and see how empowered Indian women are”. It is easy to take this apparent empowerment for granted, but if Indian women have achieved enough empowerment, why is India still among the most dangerous countries for women? Why is sexual violence so rampant? We are still coming to grips and slowly unraveling the true extent of sexual abuse of women in the Delhi pogrom 2020. The fact that relief materials being collected include emergency contraceptives speaks volumes about the yet to be uncovered cases of sexual violence.

In any war, pogrom, or riot, women and children are adversely affected. As long as women’s bodies and lives are treated as property, as conquest, as spoils of war, we cannot say that we have achieved enough rights for women. Another perspective to consider is what empowerment means to women themselves. It is very succinctly put by Pakistan’s Aurat March slogan “Mera Jism, Meri Marzi” (“My body, My will”). This is also the core of the multitude of things that are wrong with the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act. How can any authority, any other person, ever determine someone’s gender identity? How can anyone set any criteria- physical or psychological- to certify whether they are trans or not?

Our leaders, our family members, and our fellow citizens may have been conditioned by centuries of patriarchy into believing that women are the weaker sex. Maybe this is why slurs and derogatory comments are inherently misogynistic and transphobic. Yet, this is no excuse to continue perpetuating these notions. Women are fighting an entire regime, putting their bodies in the line of fire, and all you see is a tapestry of bangles, burqas, and bindis that has far greater integrity than any man who stands in the hallowed halls of Government passing orders that can and have ruined lives and communities.

This Women’s Day, do away with glorification and condescention. All you need is to open your eyes and look at the women doing everything in their power to RESIST. Multiple women’s protests and sit-ins have erupted all over the country besides Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Witness their strength and beauty in all its glory.

To all those who think this is a new phenomenon, I urge you to read about the nude protests by Manipuri grandmothers 16 years ago to voice their rage against the brutal gang rape and murder of a Manipuri woman, Manorama, by members of paramilitary forces.

 Image courtesy BBC.com

The message is clear. When you threaten our rights, we will fight, and we will not back down. Our Burqas, Bindis, and Bangles will be the symbols of our protests. These are our lives, our families, our communities, our bodies. Will India accept us without our pedestals?

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3. Sustaining Shaheen Bagh & Challenges that lie ahead

The post Burqas, Bindis, and Bangles: The Femme Revolution of India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
A Pinjra Tod march on International Working Women’s day, March 8, 2016, where students from colleges across Delhi gathered to demand the removal of hostel curfews, regularization of private accommodation, and the setting up of sexual harassment redressal mechanisms.

RIE offers a four-year undergraduate degree across five campuses, in Ajmer, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Mysore and Shillong. Until a few months ago, the lives of the female students were dictated by the position of the sun in the sky. Before sunset, they had to be locked indoors.

“Grille time could be 5:30 or 5:45 pm in winter, and 6:30 pm in summer,” one of the young women at the Bhopal campus–requesting anonymity–said, referring to the metal grille door that would be locked at curfew hour. Classes ran from 9:15 am to 5:30 pm, so they went straight from the classroom to the hostel. They could neither play outdoor sports nor order in food, if they didn’t want the usual mess fare.

If a student got sick, she had to get the chief warden (a warden designated chief of all wardens of all campus hostels) as well as the head of her department to sign her pass before she could leave campus. The library was open until 8 pm but women students had to write out a special request if they wanted to use it. A guard would have to escort them to the library and once there, they had to stay put until closing time, when guards would escort them back.

Male students had no escorts.

Some of the young women were chafing at the unfairness. They wanted to protest but did not know how to start. For advice, they turned to Pinjra Tod (break the cage), a collective of women students that started in Delhi but has since connected with colleges nationwide.

When students at RIE Bhopal contacted Pinjra Tod, they were advised to first build consensus. It was hard work because some students felt the discrimination was justified, for their own safety.

“The seniors wanted deliberations, which meant, talk to professors,” said an RIE Bhopal student, requesting anonymity. “So we asked for grille time to be extended by 15 minutes–6:45 to 7:00 pm. It didn’t happen.”

They kept talking to each other about demanding change rather than “deliberating” it. Then, a new batch of B Ed and M Ed students entered campus. They were older, more confident and a little better equipped to raise demands. When the protest finally started, most resident students ended up supporting it.

Male students too were willing to protest, but some of the girls worried that their presence could dilute the force of the women’s demands, so they were asked to stay away. The men helped by putting up posters instead, and bringing food for the protesters.

At grille time, the girls stepped out of the hostel and sat down in the playground. The security in-charge came a few times, asking them to come back in. Then, the wardens of both hostels came, then the chief warden came.

“We did not move,” said the RIE student. “Then, they said, ‘the principal is sick’. So, we settled for a letter from the wardens assuring us that most of our demands would be met within 24 hours.” The next day, the authorities went back on their word. Again, the women went outside at grille time and this time, they stayed out all night.

Students at the Regional Institute of Education, Bhopal protest against restrictive hostel curfews on September 15, 2018. The college authorities conceded and extended curfew hour. However, there have been fresh protests in April 2019.

Word got out and soon, the students were fielding media interest. Some journalists showed up, but the administration blocked them from meeting the protesters. Social media, however, could not be controlled. When Yogendra Yadav, national president of the Swaraj India party, tweeted about the protest, it was instantly amplified.

As the protest gained momentum, the protestors used scarves to mask their faces, to make sure nobody was singled out for punitive action. The RIE Bhopal student who spoke to IndiaSpend also asked to remain anonymous. “The authorities told us to remove our masks,” she said. “We refused. They wanted to meet our ‘representatives’ separately. We said, no, discussions had to be open. This went on for a while. Finally, they agreed.”

Ultimately, it took just three days to change discriminatory rules that had been in force for decades. Ever since the curfew was extended, their lives have changed significantly for the better. The girls can watch plays, attend seminars. Some have joined gyms or coaching classes for competitive exams, others dance.

We sought comments from former principal of RIE Bhopal, Hrushikesh Senapaty, currently a director at the National Council of Educational Research and Training, but he did not respond to phone calls made or emails sent over eight days.

An unquiet revolution, as women leave home
Protests like the ones at RIE are not isolated events. An unquiet revolution has been brewing in hostels across India. From Jammu to Thiruvananthapuram, young women are breaking open locks on gates, marching on the streets and sleeping under the stars.

In 2017, Mumbai University did away with an 11 pm campus curfew for women students, as did the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee, and the year before, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) campuses in Pilani and Goa. In 2018, Delhi Technological University shifted its curfew from 9 pm to 11 pm.

Punjabi University, Patiala, had young women sitting in at night, while others went on hunger strike to demand 24-hour entry to their hostels. During one protest in Miranda House, the young women decided to put a lock outside the gates, locking in the authorities for a change. It was also the year when, for the first time in its history, the hostel gates at Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi were forced to stay open all night. The year ended on a high note, with Panjab University, Chandigarh, agreeing to unrestricted hostel access.

This year, 2019, has brought more victories. After two years of protests, curfew hour at College of Engineering, Trivandrum was extended from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. The Sree Kerala Varma College, Thrissur, extended from the women’s curfew from 4.30 pm to 8.30 pm.

Not all these protests identify with the Pinjra Tod collective. Some are inspired by it and even seek help, but choose new names for their campaign. In 2017, women in Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, broke locks when a winter curfew prevented them from watching a play being staged on campus. After they succeeded in getting the 6 pm curfew extended to 8:30 pm, the group called themselves azaad panchhi (free birds), for the cage was broken.

Pinjra Tod sees itself as “a network of solidarities” rather than an organisation. Some of its activists agreed to meet this writer in Delhi but insisted on talking as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’.

“The media always asks for leaders or ‘founders’. This is neo-liberal discourse,” they said, adding that they are wary of the quest for a charming anecdote, or stories about the heroism of individuals. They are also troubled by media focusing on night-time marches. “It’s a way of framing us: girls out at night. For us, the question of equal access to education is the bigger one. Education doesn’t happen only in classrooms.”

The conflicts have grown because women are getting an education and leaving home in record numbers.

There are 799 universities, 39,071 colleges and 11,923 stand-alone institutions in India. Of these, 14 universities are exclusively for women, according to 2016 government data, the latest available. Higher education tends to be concentrated in urban areas. Bangalore district alone has 970 colleges, while Jaipur has 616. Just 50 districts account for 34% of India’s colleges.
It is inevitable that students leave their homes and live in hostels, if they are to pursue higher education.

Despite this, over 16 million young women now go to college and while their numbers are lesser than their male counterparts’, they are catching up. Women account for more than 46% of total enrolment in higher education in India, up from 39% about a decade ago, according to the All India Survey of Higher Education, 2015-16.

Across central universities, there are 3,081 hostels for young men, housing more than 750,000 students, and 2,265 hostels for 490,000 women. At the state level, the figures are more apposite, with 20,565 college hostels for 1.8 million women students and only 18,179 hostels for 1.9 million men, according to the survey data.

Clashes with authorities are inevitable and, for every victory, there is new resistance.

Resistance, amid victories
The RIE administration did not extend the freedoms its young women wrested from it to other campuses.

But word spread through social media and soon, protests began at RIE Ajmer.

A third-year student at the Ajmer campus told this writer that the administration initially made the “usual” excuses. “They said, the principal is not available, so no changes can be made. But after we’d stayed outdoors for a whole day, they accepted most of our demands.” The hostel curfew was extended to 9 pm.

The protesting students chose to stay anonymous because they worry about being expelled on flimsy pretexts. It is why many protesters cover their faces, using their “collective anonymity” as a shield against punitive action. The Central University of Rajasthan also saw protests with students covering their faces while demanding the removal of biometric attendance and surveillance systems, the abolition of curfew, and starting democratic elections. Several students had already been expelled for joining protests.

One example of extreme punitive action is Shivangi Choubey, a former student at Banaras Hindu University (BHU). She had participated in the 2017 protests, which started after the authorities refused to take cognisance of sexual harassment on campus.

Gender discrimination was also endemic: Unlike men, women were not served meat in the hostel mess, nor allowed to use mobile phones after 10 pm, and there was no WiFi in the women’s hostels.

Choubey, then an undergraduate, said a Zee News crew showed up to cover the protests. “The chief proctor told the crew that the protest was politically motivated, that we were not BHU students but had come in from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU),” she said “So, we went to her office and demanded that she either apologise or prove her allegations. Next thing we heard, she filed a police complaint alleging that she had been attacked.”

Had the police accepted the proctor’s “attempt to murder” version of events, Choubey could have gone to jail. They quashed the charge. Still, 11 students, including Choubey, were debarred from the university.

It started with a Facebook page
The Pinjra Tod story began in 2015, with Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) University in Delhi. Earlier that year, a group of students had started a campaign called “Pads Against Sexism”, which involved putting up sanitary pads in public spaces with messages written on them to remove the stigma against menstruation.

The administration responded by issuing show-cause notices to the students. A few months later, the administration disallowed “late night” outings for students living in hostels. They could stay out until 10 pm twice a month before, and even this was permitted only with the written consent of a “local guardian”.

The imposition of night restrictions at Jamia was an unpopular move, and some women pushed back. Initially, they sent a petition to the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW), complaining of discriminatory practices. The commission took suo moto notice and sent a notice to the vice chancellor and administration of JMI.

IndiaSpend sought a response from the vice chancellor about the university’s response and  about their current position on hostel curfews, but emails have gone unanswered.

The students did not want to limit their complaint to just one university. Other colleges imposed similar restrictions and, it emerged that curfew hours were worse elsewhere. So, they began to compile a report that could be used to petition on behalf of students across institutions.

A Facebook page, “Pinjra Tod: Break the Hostel Locks”, was created. Some of the student activists had earlier conceived of a newsletter about women’s lives at Delhi University. For now, they decided, a Facebook page would do.

A couple of early posts trickled in, then suddenly there was a flood.

Locked in during an earthquake
One of the stories that went into their 2016 report came from a young woman who was president of a cultural society that hosted after-dinner talks at St Stephen’s College, New Delhi. At 9:40 pm, she would have to apologise to the invited speaker and run towards her hostel.

“It was humiliating,” she wrote but not turning up for the roll call at 10 pm meant immediate expulsion. “I was once late by 10 minutes. The warden locked the door and made me stand out pleading.”

A B Tech student at JMI reported setbacks like not being able to participate in a workshop at IIT Delhi because it would go on until 8 pm; her hostel’s authorities were not willing to extend her curfew even for the duration of the workshop.

One student from Delhi’s Indraprastha College for Women lived at a privately owned hostel and shared this story: During an earthquake in 2011, the girls living on the topmost floors were locked indoors; their warden had left for the day. After this scare, nothing changed. The next year, a short circuit led to a fire and again, the girls on the top two floors had no way of getting out of the building. Another story was about a girl who broke her leg, and the owner of the hostel refused to rush her to hospital.

Other girls complained that they were not allowed to step out at night, even when they had an early morning train or a flight to catch. As a result, they were forced to spend the night at airports and railway stations.

Every story in the Pinjra Tod report confirmed discrimination: Citizens old enough not only to vote but also to marry and have children–some of them even old enough to contest parliamentary elections–were locked in, unable to participate in the cultural and academic life of the university. These were adult women who could not take a walk around the lawns or eat a meal off campus without written permission from local guardians.

Guardians and inequality
All Indian colleges and universities insist on a “guardian” rather than a local emergency point of contact for undergraduate, graduate and even doctoral scholars. This guardian decides whether or not a student can watch a movie or attend a workshop.

The sexism extends to guardians too.

A college teacher wrote in to say that when a friend’s daughter needed a local guardian, she volunteered. However, Daulatram College hostel refused on the grounds that she was single; in addition, she was treated to a lecture on the “morals of womanhood”.

When IndiaSpend contacted Daulatram principal Savita Roy, she declined comment, saying the hostel was not under her control and that the college chairperson was responsible for its administration. The college website said that the hostel was “directly under the control of the Principal who is assisted by the Warden…” A news report from February 2019 suggested  this ‘control’ is difficult to enforce and that wardens do not, in fact, take their cues from the formal authority figure.

A Pinjra Tod activist, Natasha Narwal, said class discrimination is also built into the “local guardian” requirement, since colleges assume that a student already has connections in the city. This is not true for many families. Even if a local contact is found, this individual is rarely invested in the student’s welfare or the fulfilment of her ambitions.

Natasha Narwal, who first came to Delhi in 2006, pointed out that even co-educational colleges do not offer equal housing. She enrolled at Hindu College as an undergraduate but was forced to live as a paying guest because there was no hostel for girls.

“Yet, the college had money from the UGC [University Grants Commission], which sanctions a girls’ hostel,” said Natasha. “We found out when we filed an RTI [right-to-information request]. The excuse given by the administration was that it is a heritage building and permissions are needed from the Archaeological Survey of India to build anything new.”

Finding housing as a student did not get easier while she studied towards a Masters and then an M. Phil degree. “There was an average of just two hostel seats per course offered at the university. I always had to stay at private hostels. They too had curfews, some as early as 7:30 pm. Many girls made duplicate keys on the sly or jumped over the gates when they had to.”
Devika (she requested we use one name), who was also living as a paying guest (PG) at a private hostel in Delhi when she first heard about the campaign, said private hostels were unregulated. They are more expensive, and the facilities are worse. Singh paid Rs 11,000 per semester, which jumped to Rs 14,000 by the third year. “Landlords insist on cash transactions,” she said. “They pay no taxes, issue no receipts, so we have less bargaining power.”

Difficulties in changing the discourse
Pinjra Tod is keen on changing the discourse around student rights. Apart from affordable university housing and 24×7 library access, women students want all-night dhabas (eateries), regularisation of private hostels and elected committees to deal with sexual-harassment complaints.

However, curfews remain the major focus of protest.

Young women argued that Delhi is more unsafe than it would otherwise be because women are demobilised. The 2012 gang-rape and murder of Jyoti Pandey, better known as “the Nirbhaya case”, has only made matters worse.

They accuse hostel authorities of “weaponising” the incident to control young women. Delhi’s Indraprastha College, for instance, had a regular curfew of 7:30 pm, but hostel residents were allowed four late nights a month when they could return at 10:30 pm. After 2012, the late night curfew was pulled back to 9:30 pm.

Delhi University has close to 80 affiliated colleges and more than 700,000 students. However, it has ignored protests about curfews. The students also accuse the university of fobbing off demands by citing the semi-autonomous status of certain colleges.

The Khalsa College hostel, for instance, is run by a gurdwara (Sikh temple) management. The university and the gurdwara pass the decision back and forth, even though the UGC has said women’s mobility cannot be curtailed in the name of security.

Hostel administrations tend to view all protest as a mark of indiscipline.

Faced with a serious water crisis at the Rajiv Gandhi Hostel for Girls–hundreds of students had no water to bathe or wash with–the administration wrote to the parents of some protesters, accusing the girls of “bringing disrepute to the hostel”.

In 2017, Pinjra Tod was even accused of terrorism. Ritika Thakur, who was at Hindu College at the time, had participated in a protest about the lack of a girls’ hostel. Soon after, she said, the administration tried to intimidate students through show-cause notices and a disciplinary committee hearing. “We refused to attend the hearing,” said Thakur. “Then someone from the college office called my father and said your daughter is involved with terrorist activity.”

Students jump over the gates of Hindu College, during the Pinjra Tod night march in September 2016. The college did not have a women’s hostel until 2016 and when it did finally build one, it was smaller and nearly five times as expensive as the men’s hostel.

Her parents lived in Himachal Pradesh and did not know what to think.

“My parents were crying and yelling over the phone. They thought I’d been brainwashed into doing something wrong.” She was not cowed, though. She stayed put in Delhi and did not talk to her family for weeks.

After she finished her degree, Thakur returned to Himachal Pradesh and, to her surprise, found the hostel culture there less restrictive. “We have curfews, but it isn’t as bad as in Delhi,” she said. “We don’t have to explain to wardens why we want to step out. We expected Delhi University to be more progressive but it isn’t.”

Eventually, Hindu College did build a girls hostel but the fee was Rs 1.5 lakh per year, five times the fee for the men’s hostel.

The gender tax
Pinjra Tod found what they call a “gender tax”. The average monthly fees paid by undergraduates for college hostels was Rs 8,083 for women, and Rs 5,125 for men, said Pinjra Tod’s 2016 report. The respective monthly average for postgraduate hostels was Rs 7,140 for women and Rs 4,526 for men. Many women’s hostels charge additional fees for “security”.
Another Delhi activist, Avantika Tewari, said she and her fellow students were “taken aback” at the way “progressive” women’s colleges, such as LSR and Miranda House, have reacted.

LSR, for instance, asked the girls to pay higher fees if they wanted to abolish curfew, to hire more guards, install new doors and a biometric attendance system.

Tewari traced the argument to the upper-class Indian view of education. “When we ask for changes, they respond with fee hikes,” she said. “We must work overtime to pay the fees. But to work overtime, we need to be out later, which is not permitted. The idea is that parents must finance the education of children well into their twenties. So then, who can access higher education?”

The message spreads
To discuss questions of women’s access to space and facilities at their universities, Pinjra Tod held a jan sunvai (public hearing) in October 2015. Students called professors and lawyers, and started a signature campaign. Delhi University walls were covered with graffiti and posters.

They decided on a night march, walking dimly lit streets and cutting through college campuses to bring attention to the fact that women students were locked indoors. At Miranda House, they noted, women were not allowed to go up to the terrace even though it is a women’s college, nor could they use the basketball court at night.

A Pinjra Tod poster pointing out that the University Grants Commission acknowledges women’s right to mobility and that Delhi University must also adopt a similar position on the question of hostel curfews.

When Devika heard about Pinjra Tod, she got herself added to their WhatsApp group. Girls could not attend meetings easily because of curfews, so WhatsApp was the venue for important conversations. It was also how they shared strategies and offered advice. They did not know how many students they were reaching, but every time a call for a protest went out, at least 100 young women showed up.

One of Pinjra Tod’s early campaigns was about access to DU’s central library. Women students could stay only as long as their curfew permitted, although the reading room was open until 11:00 pm. Pinjra Tod called for an event–“Library of our Dreams”–outside the central library. Students brought their own bookshelves and sat outdoors after curfew hours. Exams were around the corner, so some of their professors and seniors also showed up to help.

Along the way, they learnt to innovate. At another protest, some students impulsively climbed a gate, shouting “Pinjra Tod!”. Next time, the group brought a ladder to climb over walls. Another time, the group found itself locked out of a venue where they wanted to demonstrate. So they staged a “die-in” instead: lying on the road and playing dead.

A flashpoint came when Pinjra Tod protested at the “wall of democracy”, a wall near the Delhi University Arts faculty building that students frequently cover with posters. Students affiliated with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the youth wing of India’s ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, tore their posters.

“We put our posters on top of their old posters since their event was already over,” said Devika. “Then one of their activists called to threaten us. We decided to filed an FIR [first information report]. Word went out on WhatsApp and 50-60 women showed up at the Maurice Nagar police station.”

That show of solidarity gave the activists strength to press on and go to court. Eventually, the man who made the threatening call apologised in writing. They refuse to name him.

The power of solidarity
Solidarity also offered lessons in negotiating power at home.

Tewari, for instance, did not have hostel problems when she joined Pinjra Tod. She lived at home with her parents. However, she had internalised the usual arguments against going out at night, for education, fun or politics.

“When I first started going to protests, I’d tell my parents that I was going to a friends’ house,” she said. “Once I said, I’m going to a Diwali party. I left the house all dressed up, holding a box of mithai (sweets), but I went to a night march. I was negotiating–what’s acceptable as a good excuse to be out?”

“Before the movement,” said Tewari, “There were few individuals you could rely on. If something goes wrong at home, you can call a friend and say, take me in. But for how long?” Pinjra Tod introduced her to ideas like women keeping an open house for each other. “We learnt that we can take care of each other collectively. You don’t have to be a burden on any individual or family.”

As photos of protests, posters and statements went up on Facebook, women from other campuses began to send messages, sharing information about campus protests across India.

There were attempts to defy curfew at the Ram Manohar Lohia National Law Institute, Lucknow, and at the Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur. At Aligarh Muslim University, during a major protest on campus, the administration locked women up inside their hostels as early as 3:00 pm to ensure their “safety”. Some of the women broke the lock, made a video, uploaded it and tagged Pinjra Tod to let them know.

Some protests go on for months, even years, like the ongoing struggle at Sri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Jammu. In 2017, women had objected to the installation of another security gate, which they said would affect them psychologically, making them feel further incarcerated. The vice chancellor was quoted as saying: “Psychologically affect ho rahe ho to paagalkhaana jao” (If you are psychologically affected, go to a mental asylum). Since February 2018, the administration allegedly began to blacklist students, threatening them with suspension for writing “Pinjra Tod” in the register that they had to sign while entering and leaving the hostel.

Meanwhile, the Pinjra Tod collective realised that existing freedoms could also be lost.

Devika has since moved to JNU, where women were not locked up at night. When she first moved here, she repeatedly asked the guards: “Can we really go out at night?” She recalled walking for kilometres, just because she could.

However, in September 2018, the administration allegedly tried to confine the residents of one of the women’s hostels after some violence erupted on campus. “It was a typically patriarchal response. Locking up the women instead of the men who needed locking up,” Devika said. It had not been typical of JNU though, not until then.

The students pushed back, refusing to be confined. One of the dhabas on campus had been shut down, which made the girls feel much less secure at night. In response, a group including Devika set up a ‘guerrilla dhaba’ where students made tea, chatted and sang songs to make sure the campus did not become less woman-friendly after dark.

In the summer of 2018, JMI University also reversed the gains that had been made in curfew timings a few months ago, and issued new rules prohibiting hostel residents from joining any protests or signature campaigns.

The Panjab University battle
One of the great victories for women’s rights in recent times has been at Panjab University (PU), Chandigarh. The movement unfolded parallel to Pinjra Tod, and both campaigns expressed support for each other. The key difference is that the PU campaign was driven by elected representatives and does not make any disavowals about being political.

The president of the PU students’ union, Kanupriya (she uses one name) told this writer that curfews are not just restrictive, they also impose extra financial burdens on women.

When she arrived on campus in 2014, the curfew was 9 pm, and there were fines for any change in daily routine. “If I did not return to the hostel for a day, there was a Rs 50 fine,” Kanupriya explained, “If I went to my room and fell asleep at 9 pm, and missed roll call between 9 and 10 pm, I would be fined. There was a daily roll call that even PhD scholars had to submit to. It was just like jail.”

At the Hoshiarpur campus of the same university, the curfews were even more stringent. Residents had earlier complained about identity cards being confiscated if they were late returning to hostel, and in 2017, the women could not leave campus at all for over a month because their identity cards had been taken away for renewal.

In her first year at university, Kanupriya was too nervous to join sit-ins. In 2015, there had been a movement to allow 24×7 library access. The library was technically open to women at night, but the rule was not being implemented since all the girls were locked inside.

Encouraged by her seniors, Kanupriya was one of the first girls to go to the library at night to ensure that their right to library access was actually implemented. “At the time, we heard questions like: ‘But how will a girl come to the library?’ As if she had no legs to walk on!” she said.

Three years later, Kanupriya said, the atmosphere had changed. Female students would often go to the library at night to study in groups. When she won the students’ union election as a representative of Students for Society, she decided that if there was one thing she was going to fight, it was the idea that women had to be locked up to ensure their safety.

The 2018 movement began after an instance of sexual harassment. The administration’s response was to suggest that another grille gate be installed in front of the girls’ hostel. Kanupriya was furious. “A watchman sitting outside can’t do anything about the gerhi culture, where groups of men go around town on bikes and cars, looking at women, passing comments,” she said.
When Kanupriya put forward the demand that women must be free to enter and exit hostels at all times, the authorities initially told her that she was free to leave if she did not like the rules. Next, they offered 15-minute extensions to curfew hour, then half an hour, and so on. When negotiations broke down, the protest began.

At 9 pm on the night the protest started in 2018, the police showed up. Kanupriya recalled being worried because she saw more cops outside than women.

“We have all sorts of fears,” said Kanupriya. “Careers will be ruined. Photos might appear in the papers. Parents pressuring girls to quit.” She need not have worried. At 9:30 pm, there were more girls outside than cops. Eventually, about 750 girls defied curfew to stay outdoors between 9:30 pm and 12:30 am.

Students of Panjab University, Chandigarh, protested for 48 days in 2018, seeking 24 hour access to their hostels. The administration ultimately agreed to the demand.

For 48 nights, the protestors slept outdoors. Others showed support by bringing spare mattresses and blankets, as Kanupriya herself had done when she was younger and worried about what Mummy-Papa would say to her sleeping outdoors. In 2018, her parents knew what she was doing. They also knew she would not quit the protest to visit home on Diwali. Her mother told her what her father had said: baithi hai to kuch le ke hi uthegi (If she’s sitting in, she’ll get up only after she’s achieved something). “Diwali came and went,’ she said. “Gur-parab (a religious festival) came and went. We had exams. But the girls did not give up.”

The administration was not giving in easily. The refrain was: If something happens, who will be responsible? Kanupriya had had enough of that: “I told the security officer to quit. The UGC says that you have to provide security, not that you lock us in. I said, give your job to me, then I am responsible for security.”

Eventually, a decision was taken to allow students to come and go at all times, with one rider: women stepping out after 11 pm would log their exit in a register.

Delhi University has proved to be a harder nut to crack. When asked how the PU movement had succeeded where others have not, Kanupriya said that in order to build sustained pressure, demands have to be backed by a popular mandate. Panjab University was persuaded because she and Students for Society (SFS) could claim to speak for all students, men and women. Political organisation was necessary.

A Pinjra Tod protest held on October 8, 2018, at the University of Delhi gates to protest hostel curfews. The university has not responded sympathetically yet, and rules vary across affiliated colleges.

Evolution and relationships
Since Pinjra Tod is not linked to any political organisation, it has found support across colleges and is fed by diverse energies: teenagers from small towns with no experience of activism as well as doctoral scholars with political views. A few years ago, Tewari said, she saw all politics as bad. “I didn’t have the imagination to think beyond electoral politics. I used to think of it as an industry, an enterprise. Now I see it as the framing of a political vision.”

Nevertheless, it is true that Pinjra Tod cannot claim to speak for all students of Delhi University, and, therefore, cannot pressure the administration on their behalf. It has also taken a while for the collective to be taken seriously by other groups. They have been told that curfew hours and other matters are not serious issues, that they should focus on caste and class struggles instead.

Pinjra Tod activists said these issues are not mutually exclusive. They pointed out that Delhi University library workers supported their push for night access to libraries, and when library workers had protested, Pinjra Tod had extended support.

In 2018, the collective also issued a statement against the “criminalisation of working class lives”, after the LSR hostel warden allegedly refused to leave the hostel gates open because “delivery boys come to deliver food to teachers who live on campus”; the implication was that delivery boys posed a danger to students.

Activists also complain that mainstream media distorted their language. “We use words like manuvaad in our communication but certain media outlets changed it to ‘gender justice’, said Narwal. “One news website republished our note but dropped the words ‘brahmanical patriarchy’.”

On the other hand, the collective is facing criticism from within. Nine students publicly distanced themselves accusing “the leadership” of not adequately addressing caste, class, religion and race. While there is no formal hierarchy, the statement put out by the group of nine said they felt excluded from decisions, and the organisation was dominated by upper-caste women.
Pinjra Tod responded: “Any such experience was not inevitable, and must be attributed to the lack of political maturity and capacity of the movement collectively, and all those participating in it individually. Those of us who remain in the movement today, stay here committed to the responsibility of continuing to learn from our struggles, in building firmer solidarities.”

For now, it continues its work online, keeping track of campus protests and documenting them through social media.

Meanwhile, the Indian judiciary appears confused about interpreting constitutional freedoms guaranteed to women.

In March 2019, the Kerala High Court ruled that a woman’s rights cannot be “compromised” based on parental consent. The judgement was based on a petition by two former students at Sree Kerala Varma College, Thrissur. They moved court against hostel rules, which, they argued, violated their fundamental rights. While the court ruled in their favour, it refused to interfere with curfew hours, leaving that to the discretion of the college authorities.

It was not until the women threatened to go on strike that Sree Kerala College extended curfew from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm and not before it called parents to a meeting where they reportedly were narrated stories of attempted rape when girls stepped off campus.

Many campuses demonstrate a similar reluctance to accept changes that should be made in good faith and with respect to the law, said Pinjra Tod members. RIE campuses in Mysore and Shillong have not extended curfews since the women have not yet launched protests.

On the contrary, on April 10, Pinjra Tod reported developments at the Mysore campus, alleging a student had been summoned to the principal’s office for wearing a sleeveless dress. Pictures were taken without her consent, and eventually her parents summoned. At the Ajmer campus, the curfew extension question continues to be discussed with parents although most students are older than 18. At the Bhopal campus, a student diagnosed with depression had applied for a week’s leave and was asked to vacate the hostel.

Although Panjab University, Chandigarh, agreed to unrestricted hostel access, the regional centre in Hoshiarpur refused to follow. That would require another protest.

On the eve of International Working Women’s Day, the Pinjra Tod page was updated with news that women at the Hoshiarpur campus had leaped through their hostel windows to defy the curfew. A week later, unrestricted hostel access was allowed.

Another cage was broken.

(Zaidi is a freelance writer and the author of “3 Plays”, “Gulab, Love Stories # 1 to 14”, “Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales” and the editor of ‘Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing’.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post How Women At India’s College Hostels Are Winning Freedom appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Like many women in rural India that lack basic amenities, Damsari Ozre, 29, is up at 5 am every morning to collect enough water for bathing and breakfast. It is a task she repeats in the evening, spending 3 hours a day on this.

The 29-year-old is an ASHA (accredited social health activist–a community health worker under the National Rural Health Mission) in Velgaon, a village in Palghar tehsil, Thane district, 95 km from Mumbai, India’s financial capital.

Ozre is used to spending four to five hours a day at work, away from home, but this can rise to upto 24 hours when there is a baby on the way. In addition, she must wake up at daybreak to fetch water for her family, cook and clean for them, and work as a hired farm-hand during planting and harvest seasons.

Often, the precarious balancing act of managing household chores and the responsibilities of her government health job leave her feeling drained. “It often feels like I still have work left over at the end of the day, but especially so if I get called to help with a delivery,” she told IndiaSpend one recent March afternoon. “Whenever I leave housework unfinished I don’t like it, I feel a lot of tension.”

Indian women like Ozre do the most unpaid care and domestic work of any country globally, except Kazakhstan–a country with 94% lower gross domestic product (GDP) than India ($163 billion vs. India’s $2.6 trillion). It reveals that India is not investing enough in social care and “leaving its female population to carry the burden”, said Diya Dutta, a researcher at Oxfam India and author of a forthcoming Oxfam report, Mind the Gap, to be released on March 28, 2019.

This is the first in a five-part series on how structural inequalities, especially gender disparities, affect lives and society, based on our reporting and Oxfam India’s second India Inequality Report, Mind the Gap.

The burden of unpaid work falls disproportionately on women in India because tasks such as cooking, cleaning, fetching water and firewood are highly gendered, and patriarchal norms dictate that women also perform care work, validate men’s failure to assume domestic responsibilities and thus entrench women’s unequal social status, the report says.

Women in India currently spend upto 352 minutes per day on domestic work, 577% more than men (52 minutes) and at least 40% more than women in South Africa and China (the other two BRICS countries for which data are available), according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data.

No way out
Up at 5 am, a couple of hours before her husband and three children surface, Ozre’s daily routine features the repeated drudgery that many women in rural India have to contend with due to the lack of basic infrastructure.

Lugging metal pitchers to the village hand-pump, she spends an hour collecting water each morning, only to return later in the day, spending a total of three hours on this one task. It is her least favourite job. “Although I don’t like it, I have to do it,” she said. “The kids need to be bathed. It’s not like we can go without water.”

In July and August, when the monsoon arrives and the arid landscape dotted with bristling cacti transforms into a green, fertile plain, Damsari will also take up planting work in the neighbouring rice fields. It is tiring work, she said, “the kind that makes my hips and legs ache from all the standing and crouching”. But the additional income cannot be foregone.

Her duties at the ASHA centre continue, as do the chores waiting for her on her return from the fields. It is the number of hours in the day which must be flexible, stretched to accommodate as much as possible.

Indian women’s unpaid work plays a crucial role in sustaining economic activity, equivalent to 3.1% of GDP. However, much of the contribution goes unrecognised or is incorrectly measured, amounting to a “systemic transfer of hidden subsidies to the economy”, the report said.

India’s last ‘Time Use Survey’ was conducted in 1998-99, and there has been no similar exercise since. Fixing this will be the first step in understanding the issue of women’s unpaid work and correctly addressing it, said Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the centre for economic studies and planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

“The whole point of unpaid labour is that you want to recognise it, reduce it and redistribute it,” Ghosh said. “A Time Use Survey would tell us where men and women spend their time, in which kinds of paid activities and what kinds of unpaid activities. So far the government has been unwilling to do that, but I hope at some point public pressure will make it happen.”

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) survey is inadequate because it does not take into account women’s double burden of cooking, cleaning and other domestic duties, Ghosh said, “It just asks about your ‘principal activity’.”

Poorest suffer most from ‘time poverty’
For poor, marginalised women, the effects of shouldering the bulk of domestic responsibilities are even more acute, said Dutta. “In poor urban and rural households there’s no question of hiring anyone to do your domestic work, many of them are staying awake between 17-19 hours a day to complete their tasks.”

Women in low-income households are also more driven to find paid work than women in higher income households where not working can be a marker of social status, as per the report. Combining paid work commitments with a mountain of menial, domestic labour at home means poor women are more likely to suffer from ‘time poverty’. This is understood as experiencing such acute time pressure–anxiety that there is little freedom to choose how to allocate one’s time, with little or no room for leisure.

Time poverty fundamentally undermines women’s human rights since it undermines women’s agency and ability to make choices, as per the Oxfam report. The immense burden of work therefore prevents women from pursuing further education, employment opportunities, raising their skill-level and tending to their own wellbeing.

When asked what she would do if she had more free time to herself, Sunandhan Bhoir, 45, grinned sheepishly, took a while to reflect, and said: “I’d sleep, of course!”

Bhoir and her family are subsistence farmers, cultivating rice on a small plot of land in Damkhind, a village in Palghar tehsil of Thane district in Maharashtra. When she was pregnant, she recalled, her daily routine did not change and she was back on the farm just over a week after giving birth. If she is not around to do them, she knows the domestic tasks will not get done. “If I’m ill I just take myself to the hospital, buy the medicine, and get back to work,” she said.

Sunandhan Bhoir, 45, bears the brunt of domestic duties at home. She knows if she does not perform the housework, it will not get done. “If I’m ill, then I just take myself to the hospital, buy the medicine and get back to work,” she says.

Up to 64% of women said they have no choice taking up care work, since there is ‘no other member to carry out the domestic duties’, the 68th round of the NSSO survey found.

Bhoir’s experiences reveal how the burden of unpaid work impacts women’s health–domestic chores are often prioritised above personal wellbeing. Cash benefit transfers under the Pradhan Mantri Matritva Vandana Yojana (Maternity Benefit Programme, formerly the Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana), for example, have not meant more rest for pregnant women because they were found doing agricultural work until the time of delivery.

Women also spend eight hours less on activities such as learning, social and cultural activities according to a pilot time-use survey conducted by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MOSPI) between 1988 and 1999. This meant that the burden of unpaid work not only impacts a woman’s family and community relations but also her ability to play an effective role outside home, in turn perpetuating the gender skew.

Unpaid work keeps women out of jobs, disempowered
When asked if she would be interested in a paid job, Bhoir’s reply was clear: “There’s no time, who would do the work at home?” While extra income would be welcome, the long list of chores at home would not allow her to take up a job.

Despite a period of rapid economic growth following market liberalisation in the early 1990s, many women like Bhoir have not traded domestic work for new employment opportunities. Between 2003 and 2013, the number of women at work fell by almost 14 percentage points, from 34.8% to 27%.

A mismatch in the jobs available for women and their skills, an inherent gender bias in labour, as well as social norms which restrict the suitability of certain jobs for women, are some of the factors driving this trend, IndiaSpend reported in August 2017.

The immense burden of unpaid work that will remain at the end of a working day is another “major deterrent” for women to participate in, or rejoin the workforce, says the Oxfam report–and is one that is increasing.

The proportion of women aged over 15 and in rural areas who spend the majority of their time in domestic duties has increased from 51% in 2004-05 to 60% in 2011-12, the year the last NSSO employment survey was released.

“When you’re spending up to six hours each day fetching water, how can you be expected to go out to look for work, too?” said Ghosh. “There’s a real crisis of infrastructure and amenities that is translating into more unpaid work for women. It’s a supply-side problem which urgently needs to be addressed.”

A woman in Velgaon village, Palghar tehsil, Thane district, leaves home to collect water from the nearest well. Without piped water supply, many women spend multiple hours a day collecting and ferrying water to their homes in this village, just 95 km from Mumbai, India’s thriving financial hub.

This lack of public-sector provisions–such as basic infrastructure, elderly care homes and childcare facilities–and affordable private-sector services, means that women are being increasingly left to shoulder the care and domestic work burden, forcing them out of the workforce. This can create a vicious cycle of disempowerment, said Ghosh.

When asked by researchers if they felt their unpaid work burden had increased over five years, a significant proportion of women participating in Oxfam’s qualitative survey of 1,000 households across Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh said yes. One common reason they cited was that families are becoming smaller.

The average family size in India is shrinking, the report states–in 2001, each family on average had 4.67 members, down to 4.45 in 2011. In rural India, the proportion of nuclear families, where each sibling sets up a household of their own has increased. In 2001, 83.9% of families were nuclear, which rose to 84.5% in 2011.

Fewer adult women at home means fewer hands to help with domestic work. And as more girls stay in school longer (a positive impact of the Right To Education Act 2009) and spend more time outside of the home, adult women end up having to take on more domestic work.
No more than 49% of girls were enrolled in secondary education in 2005, compared to 74% in 2016. Boys’ secondary-school enrollment increased at a similar rate (24 percentage points) over the same period, but an inherent gender bias means their help with domestic duties is not expected.

“The fact that women don’t have an income gives them less agency, less decision-making power within the household and ultimately less mobility,” Ghosh said, adding that women undertaking too much unpaid work also means the work they do in the paid market becomes devalued. “Society assumes the work they do is less significant and so the occupations that women are crowded into get badly paid,” she said. “There’s a wage penalty imposed on those that do the unpaid work.”

The wage penalty is so evident in India that “we are at the point where even the government and the public sector don’t pay women properly”, Ghosh said. She cited the example of Anganwadi and ASHA workers, professions dominated by women, that do not even command minimum wage. Instead, these government workers, who form the backbone of the public health system, are paid Rs 2,250- Rs 4,400 depending on their role and miss out on pension, maternity, holiday and other benefits.

How women-friendly policies can help reduce unpaid work burden
In households with access to the government’s National Rural Drinking Water Programme (NRDWP), women spent on average 22 minutes less per day on care work and 60 minutes per day more on paid work, the Oxfam report finds. The results for households that had begun using LPG gas cylinders for cooking under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) programme were similar–49 minutes less spent on care work and an hour more on paid work.

Such results highlight how the provision of basic infrastructure to communities can have significant benefits for women in terms of time-use allocation. However, these programmes require adequate long-term investment and effective management to ensure success, both elements lacking in the two schemes, critics pointed out.

For example, despite spending 90% of available funds, just 18% of the rural population was connected to piped water supply between 2012 and 2017, against a target of 35%. Poor execution of projects left them “incomplete, abandoned or non-operational”, a key failure of the NRDWP scheme, as per this 2018 report from the Comptroller and Auditor General, the government’s auditor.

Expensive cylinder refill costs are affecting PMUY, a scheme that Ghosh believes was “potentially very effective”. Up to 40% of households in Chattisgarh had never refilled their cylinder, followed by 17% in Madhya Pradesh, citing costs, according to a 2018 study by MicroSave, a consulting firm. Policymakers have so far failed to address how households will overcome the affordability barrier, with refills priced anywhere between Rs 700 and Rs 800, a significant portion of a poor household’s income. Prices can also fluctuate according to international fuel markets, meaning planning for this expenditure can be difficult.

“Most households can’t afford to keep buying gas cylinders after the first free one,” said Ghosh, “So basically the cylinder sits there, in pride of place, only to be used on a special occasion. The rest of the time they’re back to using firewood.”

Need for equitable social norms
Up to 48% of women currently stop working within four months after returning from maternity leave, while up to 50% more men are working between the ages of 15-24 and 25-34, the child-rearing period, found a study by Intellecap, an investor in social enterprises. Greater attention paid to childcare and maternity leave policies could help restrict the effects of a ‘motherhood penalty’ which entails women dropping out of work, worrying about being absent from work for a long time and accepting less-satisfactory employment, as IndiaSpend reported in August 2018.

While private-sector provision for childcare is expected to grow at over 23% annually between 2017 and 2022, and the Maternity Benefit Act 2017 mandates employers with over 50 staff to provide crèches, options for the poorest in society remain limited.

Workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme are entitled to free onsite childcare provided by their employers, but in reality this is not enforced and many go without. Severe funding cuts to the centrally sponsored National Crèche Scheme meant that 8,143 crèches closed between 2013-14 and 2016-17, hitting those with no way of affording private alternatives the hardest, IndiaSpend reported in January 2019.

Damsari Ozre, 29, with her two daughters outside their home. There is no crèche available near Ozre’s village so she often ends up taking her youngest to work with her, which can affect her concentration at work, she tells IndiaSpend.

Addressing the issue of childcare and flexible work could also help initiate positive social norms that “encourage the redistribution of unpaid care and domestic work burden”, the Oxfam report says. If more children saw both parents going out to work, this could help change established social norms that say a woman’s role is purely a domestic one.

Existing patriarchal norms “pose a significant constraint to the take-up of public or market services”, said Farzana Afridi, associate professor in the economics and planning unit at the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi. In experiments providing childcare in Bangladeshi garment factories, for example, the use of crèches was low because of “the expectation is that it’s still the woman who should be doing this, coupled with worries about the quality of the service provided”.

This does not mean we should give up on public provision of facilities though, Afridi said, placing education and awareness about skewed gender attitudes at the core of a multi-pronged approach to tackle unequal labour division. “We often talk about how women need to be educated or emancipated but we don’t include men in any of this,” she said. “We used to have courses talking about civic duties, inculcating moral values in school curriculums but we have less of this now. It’s difficult, I know, but there should be experiments and changes to the curriculum to address this.”

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.

Courtesy: India Spend

The post How Unpaid Work Keeps India’s Women Poor and Unequal appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Is the situation dismal? In a survey of experts done in 2018, India ranks as the world’s most dangerous country for women. It had ranked 4th in the same survey done 7 years ago. The Global Gender Gap Index 2017 by the World Economic Forum placed India at 108 position out of 144 countries benchmarked on the basis of gender parity in the fields of economic participation, education, health and political empowerment. India ranked 131 out of 153 countries in the global Women, Peace, and Security Index 2017-18, that is based upon 11 indicators incorporating inclusion, justice, and security. Despite women accounting for 49% of India’s population, only 12% of the seats in the national legislature are held by them. The female labour force participation rate in India fell from 37% in 2006 to 27% in 2017, as per World Bank report, ranking India at 163 out of 181 countries.

Some sparks of light
More women are getting educated and coming out of their cocooned existence. They are entering professions that were till recently considered to be the domain of males. They are flying planes, driving e-rickshaws and trains, wielding the surgeon’s knife and winning Olympic medals. It is heartening to know that amongst the top 79 global airlines, Indigo Airlines employs maximum percentage of women pilots (14%) followed closely by AirIndia (nearly 10%). Even rural women are becoming more independent, working outside of their homes and exhibiting active leadership at local government level. The Economic Survey 2018 shows that 43% of all gram panchayats (village councils) in India are headed by women.

Two young female staffers at a 5 star hotel told me that though they come from humble backgrounds, their education and job has given them the courage to take their own decisions and to raise their voice against gender injustice. Some domestic helpers said that there are more job opportunities for them today. And though gender equality is a distant dream, they feel more confident than before. A domestic violence survivor said that girls are now becoming more self sufficient and raising their voices against male dominance. She herself took bold decisions to walk out of an abusive marriage through sheer determination and strong will. Her courage has inspired her daughters to take life’s challenges head on and not bow down to the whims of a patriarchal society. Very gratifying indeed!

Problems at ground level
Renu Mishra, Executive Director, Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives (AALI) rues that the number of women in the work force is dismally low and even those who are working do not get equal wages as compared to their male counterparts. Women do not even have the right to take personal decisions; they do not have the right to enter into matrimony or walk out of a relationship of their own choice.

For Dr Pooja Ramakant, breast cancer and endocrine surgeon, striking a balance between family and career is a huge problem for women of her age. “As a female surgeon, I have to struggle more than my male counterparts. Why is a woman expected to fit in the framework designed by a patriarchal society and conform to the social norms laid down by others, even if they are detrimental for her own well being? I have come across many financially independent women also who suffer in silence and stay in abusive marriages. Perhaps, due to emotional weakness, they are scared of what others will say”, shares Pooja.
Even though more and more girls are going to school, education of the girl child is still beset with problems, thinks educationist Dr Chitra Singh. “This is more so in rural areas where girls’ schools are still not a plenty and parents do not feel safe for their daughters to travel long distances. Also most rural schools have poor toilet facilities, which is another deterrent for girls. Patriarchal mindsets when coupled with poor economical status, make matters worse. They think it is a waste of their meagre resources to spend on the daughter’s education, as she will have to be married off. They would rather educate the sons who they think would support them financially later on”, she says.

The way forward
Life cannot be a bed of roses, but neither does it have to be a throne of thorns. Renu is emphatic that at a personal level each woman should ensure that she would not allow herself and her family to abide by any patriarchal value system. “All of us will have to, and can, contribute to bringing about gender equality in our own life. Let us not do anything that helps propagate patriarchy. We must also contribute to have an enabling environment at home, in schools and outside where girls/women can speak openly and fearlessly”.

Pooja exhorts women to speak up and not remain silent- “I do not remain silent if I see any injustice being done to a woman. Rather I make it a point to speak and make my voice heard and I face such situations very often in my professional life. I encourage my young girl students (interns) to not get de- motivated by society, but make their own informed choices regarding their professional and family life. Also, women should insist on an equitable distribution of work between all members of the family. Men will have to contribute equally to household work and responsibilities. Let us not forget that all women are working women, whether employed or not.”

Chitra wants all girls to get at least some basic education plus job oriented skills to make them employable. They should not be married till they are economically independent.

Renu, who is also a lawyer, is happy that India has several women friendly laws on girls’ education, prohibition of child marriage, equal inheritance of property, curbing of sexual and domestic violence, etc. However, lack of political will power and a deeply entrenched patriarchal society makes their implementation very poor. Moreover, most women- even the educated and working women- do not have much knowledge about them and many are clueless even about their existence.

She wants these laws to be part of the education curriculum, to make women, as well as men, informed about them. Also, the government’s Information and Broadcasting Ministry needs to play a more proactive role in spreading awareness around these laws and government welfare schemes for women/girls, through channels like radio, television, newspapers, and billboards. It is the onus of the government to disseminate all this information, and then act on speedy delivery of redressals if it is really keen for women to benefit from them. One reason for rise in the number of sexual offences is no quick redressal—the case could drag on for long and/or accused goes scot free in most cases.

Recognising that women in today’s world have to balance multiple responsibilities at home as well as outside, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Deputy Director General for Programmes at the World Health Organization (WHO), urges women to take care of their own health-both physical and mental health. In an exclusive interview given to CNS, she said that “Women play a very big role in healthcare delivery. Not only do women constitute the majority workforce in nursing and community healthcare work, they are also the main caregivers within households and communities. But their efforts are often taken for granted and are not publicly recognised. I would like to put the spotlight on these women who are providing healthcare either in formal or informal settings. We should appreciate this unrecognised army of women healthcare providers, and ensure that they are able to provide these services in a labour and time saving manner.”
India is a vast country, which, despite the skewed up sex ratio (945 females per 1000 males), is home to 65 crore women. That is a huge woman power, who should neither bow down in fear nor remain silent, but be brave and snatch their rights to exercise their choices- be it their education, marriage, profession, or health (including sexual and reproductive health).

The International Women’s Day 2019 campaign theme of #BalanceforBetter also calls for driving gender balance across the world- gender-balanced boardrooms, a gender-balanced governments, gender-balanced media coverage, a gender-balance of employees, more gender-balance in wealth.
So, let us celebrate our womanhood everyday and fight till we win. In solidarity we stand together!

Note: In response to this message I had posted on my FaceBook page- ‘To all the male readers of this post: Please share at least one action you have taken in your personal life to advance gender equality’ I got just one response and that was from a retired Professor of IIT Kanpur. He wrote-‘I have been instrumental in getting the PhD Degree to 3 males and 10 females. Hope this justifies my contribution’. Indeed it does.

Shobha Shukla is the Managing Editor at CNS (Citizen News Service) and a noted gender justice activist. Follow her on Twitter @Shobha1Shukla or visit www.citizen-news.org

Courtesy: Counter Current

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Yet feminist, minority and queer activists have argued that selfies can be a way for people to represent and take pride in their identity, sexuality and gender orientation. And recently, my own experiences researching gender, smart cities and urban citizenship in India have led me to see the value of selfies in a new and surprising way.

As part of a recent research project, my team and I were interested in understanding the lives of young women living in slum resettlement colonies on the outskirts of Delhi’s sprawling metropolis. To that end, we created a WhatsApp group, and asked 11 women to send in diary entries of their daily experiences in the form of images, text, audio or video as they travelled from their homes to the city over the course of six months.

Our participants turned out to be avid selfie takers. But there’s much more to this than a simple rendition of a millennial trend. Their selfies are digital, visual stories from the margins which capture their struggles and accomplishments as they step out from women’s traditional role in the home and navigate the largely male-dominated realm of the city.
 

Phones for fun and freedom

Getting a personal mobile phone is a significant event in the lives of these women. Families only permit the women to have their own phone after a series of difficult negotiations, as families are anxious that the phones could lead to what families perceive as “transgressive” behaviour, such as disobeying parents, breaking curfew, talking to men, or wearing Western clothes. Our participants convinced their families that having a phone is essential for keeping safe and staying in touch, when they have to go into the city for “legitimate” reasons such as work or education.

Smart phones usually come at a price which their families cannot afford, so when women start working they often spend their first salary to get one of the cheaper Android devices and pay off the full cost in monthly instalments. Data is affordable and connectivity can be instantaneous. Having a personal phone gives women the ability to leave the home and communicate with others away from the gaze of the family, so they see it as giving the gift of freedom.

Collage of fun selfies. WhatsApp diary entries.

Women celebrate this freedom using the phone’s front-facing camera. Of course, they take selfies for fun, using filters to transform their faces with amusing and outlandish templates.

But they also take selfies to record their visits to different places, celebrate their friendships and mark their coming of age as smart, connected young women, enjoying urban life – even when poor network connectivity means phones frequently crash and apps fail.
 

The city at arm’s length

Our participants didn’t really regard taking selfies as a political act. But when you consider how, when and where they take selfies the images are a barometer of their social, economic and political exclusion from the city. They speak to the paradoxes experienced by women living in Delhi’s urban peripheries, as both technology – and the city itself – can be at once liberating and dangerous.

In some ways, the selfies show that being in the city is liberating for women, as they represent a new-found freedom outside the home and the constraints of traditional gender roles. Through these selfies, women curate the city at arm’s length, placing themselves in the centre of the frame as they stage their own arrival in many different public places.

Collage of selfies in the city. WhatsApp diaries

But by recording women’s presence at a particular time and place, these selfies also give away what, when and where the women cannot be. For example, selfies are mostly taken during the day, or when they are with a group of friends, in places where there are fewer men, or in familiar neighbourhoods where they feel comfortable and confident. Very rarely do these women take selfies when they travel alone, – because sexually predatory male attention remains a constant feature of their journeys.

Uploading selfies to Facebook also exposes these women to the dangers of online and offline stalking, harassment and bullying. A disturbing picture entry in the WhatsApp diary, captioned “my selfie in a bus full of men”, evoked the Nirbhaya case of 2012 – when a young woman was fatally gang raped on a bus – and suggested that the selfie is also a way for these women to witness and record danger in their everyday life.
 

Phones between the home and the city

Selfies inside the home are largely absent in the WhatsApp diary entries. Although home is valued by their families as private – and therefore safe for women, our participants often viewed it as a place of confinement.

Home is where the women’s daily struggles with poor infrastructure for drinking water, sanitation, waste collection and transport take place. More significantly, family control over women’s bodies – through strict curfew hours and restrictions on where they can go – highlight older and younger generations’ very different understandings of freedom and danger.

While older generations who grew up without mobile phones are mainly concerned about women’s physical safety, the young women in our research have to deal with daily invasions of privacy, sexual harassment and abuse both at home and in the city, online and in real life. Their selfies tell a story about what it’s like to navigate the journeys between home and the city, as the boundaries between public and private, freedom and danger become increasingly blurred in these “smart times”.
 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Davos: Unpaid work done by women looking after their homes and children is worth 3.1% of the country’s GDP. Women spend 312 minutes per day in urban areas and 291 minutes per day in rural areas on such unpaid care work. In comparison, men spend only 29 minutes in urban and 32 minutes in rural areas on unpaid care work.
 
An Oxfam report on inequality published on January 21 revealed much more. It added that at the workplace, women still receive 34% fewer wages than their male counterparts for the same work.
 
“When governments reduce their expenditures on essential public services such as education and healthcare, women and girls are the first ones to lose out on these services,” according to the report.
 
Girl children from the lower strata of society are lucky to see a classroom at all. In India, girls belonging to families in the top 20% get nine years of education on average, while girls from families in the bottom 20% get none at all. Even those who make it to school are often pulled out when money is tight, the report said. In addition, more than 23 million girls drop out of school annually because of lack of toilets in school and proper menstrual hygiene management facilities.
 
There were only nine women billionaires in the list of 119 Indian billionaires.
 
Then, because social norms subject women to domesticity, they often have to stay home and look after the young and the elderly.
 
Citing a 1,000-household survey undertaken in the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh, Oxfam in its report said 53% of those surveyed said it was acceptable to harshly criticise a woman if she failed to care well for the children and 33% felt it was acceptable to even beat a woman for this reason.
 
Similarly, 60% felt it was acceptable to harshly criticise a woman if she left a dependent or ill adult unattended and 36% felt it was acceptable to beat her for the same reason.
 
Also, 41% felt it was acceptable to beat a woman if she did not prepare a meal for the men in the family while 68% felt it was acceptable to criticise her harshly.
 
Besides, 42% said a woman should be beaten if she failed to fetch water or fuelwood for her family and 65% felt she deserved to be criticised harshly.
 
A whopping 54% felt it was fine to beat a woman if she left the house without asking a man’s permission and 86% felt she should be criticised harshly for doing so.
 
Observing that these issues put severe restrictions on women’s ability to go out and undertake paid work, Oxfam said women’s ability to undertake paid work is not merely determined by economic considerations but also by social norms.
 
“It is understood that a woman’s primary role is to take care of the house and her family and any income-generating work is secondary to this role,” it added.
 
The study also found that cutting taxes on wealth predominantly benefits men who own 50% more wealth than women globally, and control over 86% of corporations.
 
The Oxfam study also referred to India’s poor 108th ranking on the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Index of 2018, saying it was 10 notches less than in 2006 and far below the global average and behind its neighbours China and Bangladesh.
 
Oxfam said India has many laws that deal with violence against women, but their implementation remains a challenge, including due to a deeply patriarchal society.
 
Oxfam said inequality has a “female face” in India, where women are less likely to have paid work when compared to men, while even among the richest there are only nine women in the country’s 119-member billionaires club.
 
The paid work women do bring them fewer earnings as compared to men due to the existing wage gap and therefore households that rely primarily on female earners tend to be poorer, it said, referring to the country’s gender pay gap at 34%.
 
It observed that various intersections of caste, class, religion, age and sexual orientation have further implications on women inequality as a process.
 

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Researchers at the Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California, San Diego, and the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai analysed the effects of gender budgeting on key outcomes related to maternal health care and women’s safety as part of the Gender Project [Gender Equity aNd DEmography Research Project] with the goal of supporting India’s achievement of Sustainable Development Goals 5–Gender Equality and Empowerment and 3: Good Health and Well-Being.

Gender budgeting: Its origins and place in India
Gender budgeting, an approach encouraged internationally since 2001, allows governments to take a fiscal path to address persistent gender inequalities that compromise health and development of nations. This typically involves one or a combination of the following three budgeting approaches: 1) gender-informed resource allocation to promote gender inclusion; 2) gender-assessed budgets where sex-disaggregated data are used to determine whether beneficiaries differ by sex; 3) gender-targeted budgeting based on a priori-determined gender needs.

In 2001, India began evaluating its economic policies with a gendered lens, to determine whether and how to better meet the needs of women and girls and to improve gender equality at scale. State-level gender budgeting followed, led by Odisha in 2004, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh in 2005, followed by Gujarat, Karnataka, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir in 2006.

Currently, 16 Indian states practise gender budgeting and provide accounts for state gender budgets. [See Table 1 and Figure 1.] Gender budgeting approaches in India emphasised resource allocation for gender inclusion and gender-targeted budgeting, particularly in areas of health, education and more recently, safety.
 

Source: State Budget Documents

Figure 1: Map of Gender Budgeting States (GBS) and Non-Gender Budgeting States (NGBS) in India

Uneven responses across the world
More than 100 countries have instituted gender budgeting, and multi-country analysis of the impact of gender budgeting shows effects in some nations, but not others. In countries showing an effect, there are documented improvements in both allocation and focus of funding as well as use of sex disaggregated data to affect policy makers’ decision-making regarding gender inequality issues and to monitor gender-budgeting impact.

Examples of nations that show impact from gender budgeting include Mexico and Brazil, where budgetary allocations to women’s health issues increased, and Iceland, where gender data guided tax code reforms to ensure economic equality by sex. Lack of comprehensive (i.e., cross-sectoral) implementation and variability in evaluation periods were viewed as reasons for inconsistent effects across countries.

In India, gender budgeting showed some promise over a decade
Research from India has found that gender budgeting is linked to improvements in girl education, especially in the field of primary education.

The Gender Project researchers tested whether gender budgeting was associated with better improvements from 2005-06 to 2015-16 for maternal health and women’s safety outcomes:

1. Antenatal Care (ANC): Percentage of mothers who had four or more ANC visits, for all births in the past five years;
2. Institutional Delivery: Percentage of mothers who gave birth in a clinic or hospital, for all births in the past five years;
3. Child/Early Marriage: Percentage of women who married before age 18 years, among 20- to 24-year-olds;
4. Spousal Violence: Percentage of women reporting physical or sexual violence from husband, among ever-married women.

Gender budgeting states fared worse than others in 2005-06 and in 2015-16 on all four gender equality outcome indicators–ANC, institutional delivery, child/early marriage and spousal violence, though states were not significantly different on these outcomes in either 2005-06 or 2015-16 [See Figure 2].

In-depth examination of changes over time demonstrated that states with gender budgeting, relative to those without it, showed greater improvement over time across all indicators. Only spousal violence, however, showed statistically significant effect over time. More specifically, where gender budgeting states demonstrated a 7% decline in spousal violence from 2005-06 to 2015-16, non-gender budgeting states demonstrated only a 1% decline (p=.04). [See Figure 3.]

Figure 2: Differences Between Non-Gender Budgeting States (NGBS) & Gender Budgeting States (GBS) On Gender Equality Indicators: ANC, Institutional Delivery, Child/Early Marriage and Spousal Violence, in 2005-06 (A) and 2015-16 (B)

Note: t-tests were used to determine significant differences for NGBS and GBS on mean prevalence for each gender equality indicator; *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001. No significant differences were observed.         

Figure 3: Differences Between Non-Gender Budgeting States (NGBS) & Gender Budgeting States (GBS) On Change In Mean Prevalence Of Gender Equality Indicators From 2005-06 To 2015-16.

Note: t-tests were used to determine significant differences between NGBS and GBS for change over time on mean prevalence for each gender equality indicator; *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001. Only spousal violence was significant.

Lack of granular data impedes impact study
States’ enactment of gender budgeting is linked to the demonstrated national reduction in spousal violence in India, but not to other key gender equality indicators such as uptake of maternal health services or reduction in child marriage.
Analyses of budgets in India show that while funding for women is fairly easy to identify, these funds are typically less than 1% of the total budget, and the remaining 99% of the budget is usually indicative of sectors (e.g., health, social welfare) and not easily disaggregated into gender targets or focus.

Improvements in the financing and efficiencies of schemes in the health and education sectors in the past 15 years may be a challenge to assessing the specific impacts of gender budgeting on maternal healthcare utilisation and reduction in child marriage. However, the impact of gender budgeting on spousal violence suggests that this form of budgeting can have impact beyond existing sector-wise schemes.

The findings of this study as related to spousal violence cannot be tracked back to budgetary efforts focused on spousal violence prevention given the lack of available data on this. Further research is needed to identify the mechanism through which gender budgeting may have impact on specific gender equality indicators.

Spousal violence affects almost one in three married women in India, so the value of gender budgeting in reducing its prevalence cannot be understated. But as stated earlier, comparable granular data on budgetary allocations for gender budgets is needed to help us link data findings more directly to policies. Simultaneously, researchers will need high quality gender data in a timely fashion to correspond with gender budget data for ongoing and stronger analyses. Implementation of NFHS-5 so rapidly after NFHS-4 will be a boon to these efforts.

(Anita Raj is a Tata Chancellor Professor of Society and Health, Professor of Medicine and Education Studies, and Director of the Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California, San Diego. Kaushik Bhadra is a Research Analyst; Nandita Bhan is a Research Scientist, and Namratha Rao is a Research Coordinator. All are with the Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California, San Diego, but based in Delhi, India. Laishram Ladusingh is Professor and Head of Mathematical Demography and Statistics at the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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About 15 women committed suicide per 100,000 in India–2.1 times the global average and the sixth highest the world in 2016, according to the Gender Differentials and State Variations In Suicide Deaths in India: The Global Burden of Disease Study 1990–2016 study published in The Lancet, a medical journal, in September 2018.

There has been a 27% decline in Indian women’s age standardised suicide death rate (SDR) while the age standardised SDR did not change in men from 1990 to 2016. Age standardised rates help compare prevalence among different populations.

“This may be because of increasing education levels, higher age of marriage in women and economic progress between 1990 and 2016,” said Rakhi Dandona, lead author of the paper and professor of public health at the Public Health Foundation of India, a think tank and advocacy.

Married women account for the highest proportion of suicide deaths among women in India, noted the study, despite the fact that marriage is known as a protective factor against suicides globally. This can be explained by factors such as arranged marriage, early marriage, young motherhood, low status, domestic violence and [lack of] economic independence, said the study.

Early marriage and low status
Early marriages are still common in India; 27% Indian girls were married before 18 years and 8% of girls (15- 19 years) were pregnant before the age of 19 years, according to the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4).

Domestic violence has a direct relation with suicide ideation in women across the world. Almost 29% married women in the 15-49 years age group in India have experienced spousal violence and 3% faced violence during pregnancy, NFHS-4 showed.

Only 36% Indian women aged 15-49 years have more than 10 years of education. So, coupled with early marriage, motherhood and domestic violence, Indian women do not have the education or economic independence to fall back on.

“Unlike men, education is a protective factor for women against suicide,” said Lakshmi Vijayakumar, SNEHA India and Voluntary Health Services, Chennai, and one of the authors of the study.  

While the most common reason for men to commit suicide is financial debt, it is family and marital problems for women, she said.

Preventing child marriages, educating girls and curbing dowry will help prevent suicides in women, Vijayakumar said.

Another important factor for suicides by women is alcohol consumption among men. “Many studies have shown a direct link between alcohol abuse by men, domestic violence and suicides by women,” she added.

Reduction of sexual and intimate partner violence can reduce suicides in women; according to an estimate, in the absence of sexual abuse, female suicide attempt over lifetime would fall by 28% relative to 7% in men.

Difference in men and women
“While women’s suicides may have decreased due to various social factors, it is worrying that men’s suicide rate has not changed in nearly three decades,” said Dandona.

Deaths due to suicide among women were 20 per 100,000 in 1990 and 15 per 100,000 in 2016; in men, the figure was 22 per 100,000 in 1990 and 21 per 100,000 in 2016.

Globally, the suicide risk in men is two times–200%–as high as women; in India, the difference is smaller: Only 50% higher than women.

Suicide was the leading cause of death in the 15-39 years age group, accounting for 71% deaths in women and 58% deaths in men.

Suicides in Indian Women vs Indian Men

Source: The Lancet

Note: ETL refers to epidemiological transition level–that is, transition from communicable to non-communicable diseases with development of the region. Low ETL refers to high burden of communicable diseases and high ETL refers to high burden of non-communicable diseases.

Women’s suicide attempts go unreported
While these estimates are significant in understanding the extent of suicides in India, they miss out on suicide attempts and suicides that do not lead to deaths.

Actual suicides of women are often not reported because families are held responsible if suicides occur within seven years of marriage. There was a 37% difference in estimated suicides in women versus suicides reported by the National Crime Records Bureau compared to 25% difference in estimated suicides and reported suicides in men, according to the estimates of the 2014 suicide mortality study.

Many suicide attempts by women by poisoning have been termed as accidental poisoning, said Sangeeta Rege, coordinator of CEHAT, a health advocacy that started the first hospital-based crisis centres for women facing violence in India.

At any given time, there are 25 women admitted in government hospitals per month under “accidental poisoning”, she said.

“We started the first Dilaasa [hospital-based crisis centre] in 2000 after meeting many such women who had ingested poison. In hospitals, these women received medical treatment but did not receive any support that could prevent future attempts at suicide.”  

Psychiatrists tend to view women as having adjustment issues while ignoring the hostile environment she lives in that makes her take the extreme step, she added.

There has also been a rise in suicides in adolescent girls, according to the study. Nearly 17% deaths of girls aged 15-19 years were due to suicide, the third highest incidence among all age groups.

“Parental abuse is hardly ever spoken about but parents are extremely abusive and controlling; young girls have no autonomy or independence to make their own decisions,” said Rege.

As much as 30% of domestic violence was committed by parents or step-parents, according to the national health survey.

Regional differences
Suicide was the leading cause of death in 26 of 31 states for women aged 15-29 years. Suicide contributed to a lower proportion of deaths in less developed states than developing and developed states, said The Lancet study.

Age Standardised Suicide Death Rate For Both Sexes, 2018

Source: The Lancet (Image 4, age standardised SDR in 2016)

The highest SDR was in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, West Bengal, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana–more than 18 per 100,0000 population; only three countries–Greenland (38.1), Lesotho (35.3) and Uganda (18.7)–have higher SDR.

The southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu had higher SDR for men and women than other parts of the country.

“Suicide is very complex and cannot be reduced to a single factor,” said Dandona.

“Southern states are more urbanised, and that leads to stress factors like overcrowding, smaller families and expensive lifestyles leading to high SDR. With time, these stabilise and then there is increase in SDR in rural areas as more people move to cities and there is lack of development.”

The highest declines in suicides among women from 1990 to 2016 were in Uttarakhand (45%), Sikkim (43%), Himachal Pradesh (40%) and Nagaland (40%).

Need more research on suicides in India
Suicides are a leading cause of death among the young (15-39 years) but there is very little research on suicides, and how to prevent them other than public attention towards farmer suicides.

Unchanging rates of suicides in men need to be explored. “For suicides among men in India, it appears that young adults are a vulnerable group, and marriage does not seem to be protective for them either,” the Lancet study noted.

Men tend to internalise the stress and have trouble seeking help when facing emotional issues. “There are so many cases where there has been no sign of trouble till the man has taken his own life,” said Dandona.

Decriminalisation of suicides in 2017 as well as passing of the National Mental Health Act are expected to improve access to mental health treatment and reduction in stigma and under-reporting of suicide, said the study.

Restricting the use of pesticides, which was found to be the most common way to commit suicide, can help as would regulating the sale of alcohol. “Educating general physicians to detect signs of depression, loneliness and suicides can help and school level education to help resolve interpersonal conflicts and dealing with emotions like anger,” Vijayakumar said.

“We need to start first by declaring suicide a national health priority,” said Vikram Patel, professor, department of global health and population, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and author of the 2014 study on suicides in India. He suggested setting up a cross-sectoral/ministerial commission to prioritise, implement and evaluate strategies for reducing suicides.

India must take inspiration from China and Sri Lanka where suicide rates have plummeted in the last decade to find out which interventions work, Patel added.

(Yadavar is a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)

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