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Illiterate tribal women in Uttar Pradesh equip themselves with non-conventional skills like repairing handpumps.
Chamela, a tribal woman of Banda (Shahuji Maharaj district, Uttar Pradesh) is an excellent handpump mechanic. Every day, she cycles from village to village, wielding a wrench, dismantling pumps and putting them back in perfect order. Though illiterate, Chamela and several other dalit and Kol tribal women learned the intricacies of handpump repair through the intervention of a voluntary group called Vanangana. Founded by Madhavi Kuckreja in 1994, Vanangana, derived from van (forest) and angan (courtyard), seeks to impart non-conventional skills to women, enabling them to manage their daily lives more effectively. Banda’s low water table and indifferent irrigation facilities led to ! a heavy reliance on handpumps, which never seemed to work. Training the women in repair has changed the character of this dry and hard land. “There was some doubt whether illiterate women could understand the mechanics involved, but they surprised all of us by learning quickly,” recalls Ashok Mishra, junior engineer of Jal Nigam, a government agency that trained the women initially. In the Manickpur block to which the women were first assigned, nearly half the pumps were inoperative. Villages had to wait for days for the two Jal Nigam mechanics who attended to nearly 930 pumps spread over an area of 1,000 sq kms. The newly acquired skills of the women, however, have now ensured that almost 90 per cent of the pumps work all through the summer. The lives of the women have simultaneously changed. Many have chosen this as a profession. While Chamela fought with her mother-in-law to be allowed to do the job, oth! ers have battled chauvinism, scorn and apathy to become mechanics themselves. In some villages, the men would drive them away, saying they didn’t trust women to do a man’s job. Their ‘low’ caste status too worked against them. In Bauri village, the handpump was outside the home of an upper-caste pradhan (village headman), who prevented the women from touching it. He only agreed after the villagers coerced him. The achievements of the women mechanics have prompted the Uttar Pradesh (UP) state government to replicate the scheme in other regions too. Vanangana was also chosen by the Uttar Pradesh government as one of the participant NGOs in the World Bank-funded Swajal Project. This rural water supply and environmental sanitation project works in over 1,000 villages in 19 districts of the state. Contact: Madhavi Kuckreja
&nb! sp; Vanangana
Chitrakoot, Karvi
Uttar Pradesh, India
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