Women Can’t Do Everything, Can You?

One topic that I think I will revisit often throughout the year is the status of women in India and how CRHP (the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Jamkhed) has succeeded in empowering them. The level of disparity in the rights of women versus men is not created by laws but much more socially governed, especially in rural India.

In the towns I’ve visited and from numerous conversations and discussions, I’ve gathered that women are responsible for everything. Women raise the kids from birth and watch over them daily, they prepare three meals per day (of which they eat half of what the man does), they get water from the well in the morning and then go to some manual labor job. They fall asleep late after cleaning and wake up early to cook and make little money from farming another family’s land. After she receives her paycheck, much of it is often taken (or aggressively stolen) by the husband who gambles and drinks during the day.

They seem to do everything for the family but still they have little rights and no respect. They are often beaten by their husband and even by the mother-in-law (common in India where they live with their son’s family). But the women think that being hit is the norm and thus do not complain. If they decide to complain, there is often no one to turn to, as her parents would not support her, telling her that this is her fate and she needs to deal with it to protect the family name. Due to Hinduism and the idea of reincarnation, often the problems that you face in your present life is a reflection of the mistakes and poor decisions that you had committed in a previous life. The woman is thus trapped and often has to live with it.

And even though women seem to carry the family workload, it is still considered a failure of the pregnant mother to bear a female baby. One of the greatest ways to be accepted into the husband’s family is to give birth to a boy, so much so that gender-based abortions have been illegalized in India since 1991 (adoption was legalized in 1974). What happens is that the family will find early in her pregnancy (around 20 weeks) the sex of the child, and if it is female, the family will knowingly have an abortion. This was so commonplace that the ratio of women to men in India was around 945:1000 in 1991 and dropped to 927:1000 in 2001 (the national U.S. average is 1043 women to 1000 men in 2002). In the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, the ratio even reached 793:1000 and 820:1000, respectively. Further, a study from UNICEF stated “A report from Bombay in 1984 on abortions after prenatal sex determination stated that 7,999 out of 8,000 of the aborted fetuses were females. Sex determination has become a lucrative business.”1, 2 And a study by the Lancet published in June, 2006, reported that up to 500,000 female fetuses are aborted each year in India, leading to the birth of nearly 1 million fewer girls over the past two decades.

These are tales and accounts I have heard while visiting the surrounding villages and throughout our training course for the past week. The situation is very grim and sad and in some ways has made me embarrassed to be a man. Of course not all men are like this and I have met men who have supported their wives through thick and thin, but it’s the acceptance of it all that is most disturbing. It is this disenfranchisement and inferiority that has made me uncomfortable and that the CRHP program has sought to reverse.

CRHP realized that very often the health of the mother is directly related to the health of the child, since the mother bears much of the responsibility of raising the child. So to target the health of both the child and mother, initiatives were made to empower women. Some of these I have already discussed, but in particular the Village Health Worker was introduced as the liaison between her village and CRHP. She is responsible for spreading knowledge on nutrition and water cleanliness, checking on pregnant mothers, educating adolescent girls, and pretty much working to have the village care for it’s own health. From the VHW came the women’s groups (known as Mahila Vikas Mandal – Women’s Development Group) that organized the women in the village to stand up for their rights, especially against domestic violence and discrimination. Some villages have even started self-help groups, which are smaller groups of women who help each other when taking out a loan from a bank, starting a business, buying goats or cows, and even starting their own micro-credit finance group.

To see the women in the villages so confident, independent and knowledgeable about their rights is amazing after hearing their stories and listening to their situation ten or twenty years ago. Many of these women have gone against all odds to stand up to sexism and transform their villages around to women’s rights and children’s health. On Friday we went to a village called Kusadgaon, where we heard from one woman who brought her husband to state court (she bypassed the village court) and forced him to pay her 200,000 Rupees (around $5000) for running out on her and their kids. She used the money to buy a house, start a barbershop for her son and fund other start-ups.

A big theme over the past week has been the status of women in India and how CRHP has had to work tirelessly to create slow but progressive change. It’s a fascinating issue and I certainly do look forward to learning more about it in the coming months.