Women panchayat members: Catapulted into the public domain
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More than a decade after the 73rd constitutional amendment made it mandatory for 33% of all panchayat seats to be reserved for women, have women begun to play a significant role in local self-governance?
On July 25, 2000, Lata Sahu was branded a witch and forced to parade naked in the village of Bijli in Raipur district. Her crime: she had dared to stand for the post of sarpanch against the wife of powerful clan leader Ramesh Yadav. Yadav's wife had earlier won two consecutive terms.
Gubrail's story is even more tragic. A tribal sarpanch in Betul district of Madhya Pradesh, Gubrail took the extreme step of burning herself on February 11, 2003 because she could not cope with a corrupt bureaucracy. She had personally raised money to expedite local work in the village. But when she asked local bureaucrats to reimburse the money, they demanded a cut. Unable to bear the humiliation, Gubrail set herself alight.
But for every tragic story there are a hundred positive ones of women who, having powered their way into officialdom, are now ensuring that devolution of power works at the ground level.
Take the case of Anita Ramu Dhangada, a tribal from Thane district in Maharashtra, who was sold as a bonded labourer to a rich local landlord. She was freed through the intervention of a local non-government organisation, the Shramjeevi Sangathana, which encouraged her to stand for panchayat elections on a Congress ticket. Anita not only went on to win the elections, held on December 22, 2003, but is now working to free bonded labourers in her region.
Geeta Rahore of the Jamonia Talab gram panchayat in Sehore in Madhya Pradesh has for the last decade been at the forefront in promoting education, organising health campaigns and mobilising women to fight a slew of evils including alcoholism, child marriage, domestic violence and gambling. Thanks to her interventions, the panchayat in her village was awarded Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 for being the best local panchayat for two consecutive terms.
Nothing personifies the success of such interventions better than the all-women panchayats that dot the nation.
South Tripura has a nine-member gram panchayat led by Tulabati Debbarma. Of these, five are tribal women and four are members of scheduled castes (SCs). Better known are West Bengal's 21 all-women panchayats. The women were elected to power in 1993 and subsequently re-elected in 1998. Their first task was to end illiteracy; their second, to ensure that all the villages in their jurisdiction were provided drinking water through wells and tubewells. Determined to ensure that every home had proper sanitation facilities, they spearheaded low-cost latrines in dalit homes at a nominal cost of Rs 150.
The 10 lakh women elected to panchayats are no longer willing to be backbenchers. The passing of the 73rd constitutional amendment made it mandatory for 33% of all panchayat seats to be reserved for women. It also mandated quotas for socially marginalised sections including dalits and scheduled castes and scheduled tribes (SC/STs).
Most of these women are catapulted out of their homes into the public domain where they have to master the difficult art of politics. But they are fast and willing learners. Thirty women sarpanches from Ajmer, Bhilwara, Tonk and Kota in Rajasthan attended a jan sunwai (public hearing) in Ajmer some years ago where they blasted their male colleagues for following the practices of 'our honourable parliamentarians' by introducing a no-confidence motion against the women every time they tried to initiate a new project in the village. These tactics were not going to work, the women insisted. Nandu Devi, pradhan of the Rai Mangra panchayat, pointed out how male panches tried to take advantage of her illiteracy by asking her to sign all kinds of strange documents. "Now, before signing any document, I make a neutral person read out its contents," she says.
Nor are the women willing to be proxy panchayats. Scores of women panches blasted Punjab's former panchayat minister Nirmal Singh Kahlon for not taking a firm line with recalcitrant husbands and other male family members who interfered with their functioning. "They have to be banned from entering our panchayat offices," was the unanimous opinion of the women. Kahlon dared not turn a deaf ear to their demands.
Some women panches in Punjab have made great progress. Rajinder Kaur, a sarpanch in Begowal in Ludhiana district, has helped set up a state-of-the-art dispensary, modern schools and a milk producers' co-operative. She operates out of an air-conditioned panchayat ghar and in 1996 her village was judged the best village in Asia.
This is not to say that women panchayat members do not face enormous problems. Their biggest challenge is how to cope with the problem of state governments deliberately setting up alternative machinery to curtail their powers.
Dr George Mathews, director of the Indian Social Institute, points out: "Several state governments have deliberately created parallel bodies such as forest management groups and drinking water groups headed by the collector. This has been done to devalue the panches. There are forces at work in our society that stand to gain from the patwari-block development officer nexus."
The left-run states have done an admirable job of destroying this nexus. Mathews cites the example of Kerala where a single panchayat is receiving over Rs 1 crore annually to oversee development projects.
Becoming a member of a panchayat opens the way to a political career. P Baby Balakrishnan was elected president of the Madikai gram panchayat in Kasaragod district at the age of 21. She went on to become an MLA and is now a member of parliament. At the other end of the spectrum is Uttar Pradesh, a state that seems to carry the flag for backwardness and has still to hold panchayat elections.
In Bihar, women fought against tremendous odds to participate in panchayat elections held in 2001, after a span of 22 years. In Narihar village, in Saharsa district, Nilam Prakash was willing to pit herself against Rajput heavyweight Mahadeo Singh, a landlord who has controlled the local levers of power for 30 years.
The other major impediment these women face is a state government decision to disallow men and women with more than two children from contesting panchayat elections or continuing in office. Presently six states, including Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, have made this norm mandatory for all panchayat members. With the minimum age for contesting elections having been lowered from 26 to 21 years, this immediately affects thousands of younger men and women in the reproductive age-group.
The two-child policy has had the greatest impact on women and marginalised sections of society. Nirmala Buch, who runs a Bhopal-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), Mahila Chetna Manch (MCM), points out that already 412 panchayat members in Rajasthan, 350 from Madhya Pradesh and 275 in Haryana have been removed from their posts over the past three years because of their non-compliance with the norm. "In Madhya Pradesh, all those removed were tribals who are not aware of the laws of the land. Instead of encouraging them to participate in this process, they are being turned away," says Buch.
Still, these women continue to battle all the odds. One of the more moving stories is of Durga Devi from Sarbari village in Rajasthan's Sikar district. Durga Devi, who belongs to the Mehtar community, was elected to a reserved seat. She refused to give up her job as a sweeper. "I believe in the dignity of labour. If I do not clean the streets, someone else will do it," she says. She works as a sweeper in the morning, and her afternoons are devoted to carrying out her duties as sarpanch. Her first job, on being elected, was to ensure that every child in the village was enrolled in school. You can't get better than that.
(Rashme Sehgal is a Delhi-based writer and journalist)
InfoChange News & Features, September 2004