In 1950, the newly independent India attempted to deal with the malevolence of the caste system, not by annulling it but by giving the untouchables a new name: “the Scheduled Castes.” At the same time, the government allocated 17 percent of civil service jobs and 17 percent of parliament seats to the Dalits. The practices of untouchability were forbidden by law and made punishable under the Indian constitution. Moreover, the new laws said the state had to protect the Scheduled Castes from social injustice. The government also created scholarships for Dalit children so they could get an education. Although some Dalits prospered—K.R. Narayanan became president of India in 1997 and Bhimrao Ambedkar wrote the new constitution—the government’s experiment in emancipation failed. Ninety-nine percent of Dalits are still living the lives of untouchables.
Even though the Dalits who live in India’s teeming cities are relegated to slum living, low-paying jobs and discrimination, they do have more access to the laws designed to protect them. But 70 percent of India’s 1 billion people live in villages, far from the magistrates and urban courts, and it is there, out of the sight of the lawmakers and among traditionalists, that the ancient indignities heaped on the outcastes, particularly the women, flourish.
Back in Etangur, Gowramma’s baby was fussing because she was thirsty. A twenty-five-year-old mother of three, who’d been married at the age of thirteen, Gowramma couldn’t leave on her trek for water until Dikshitra fell asleep: she couldn’t carry the baby along with the heavy water jugs. She pointed to a pathetic collection of vessels hooked over the dry spout of the water pump in her village. Everyone was waiting for water.
Eventually, a neighbour came by to watch over Dikshitra, and Gowramma began her dreaded walk for water in the heat of the noonday sun.
Gowramma’s husband works as a bonded labourer because they once needed to borrow money from the landlord for food. He earns about 25 cents a day, barely enough to repay the debt and provide a low-calorie cereal that his family eats three times a day. As she walked, Gowramma shared a dream with me: “We have two cows. I want to start a dairy. I could provide milk to the people, earn enough money to get us out of bondage. But the upper castes won’t allow me to do that.” Gowramma’s plan to sell milk would not only get their family on its feet, it would also contribute to solving the problem with food shortages in the region. But she couldn’t make it happen.
When women such as Gowramma are confronted with barriers limiting their right to start a business, it has the same negative effect as when women elsewhere are denied access to markets, social networks and credit: everyone loses. Even in high-income countries, social norms and market barriers still contribute to keeping women away from opportunities that can move them into better-paying jobs. When Hillary Clinton addressed the economic summit on women, she raised the issue of women farmers with a view to explaining how, if given a chance, the women can reduce food shortages and boost nutrition levels. “Take just one sector of our economy—agriculture—to illustrate what I mean. We know women play an important role in driving agriculture-led growth worldwide. They sustain every link in the agricultural chain: they plant the seeds; they care for the livestock; they harvest the crops; they sell them at markets; they store the food, and then they prepare it for consumption.”
Then Clinton drew the big picture: “Despite their presence in all of these kinds of jobs, they have less to show for all of their work. Women farmers are up to 30 percent less productive than male farmers, and that’s not because they are working less or are less committed. It’s because women farmers have access to fewer resources. They have less fertilizer, fewer tools, poorer-quality seeds, and less access to training or to land. And they have much less time to farm because they also have to do most of the household work. When that resource gap is closed and resources are allocated equally—and, better yet, efficiently—women and men are equally productive in agriculture. And that has positive benefits. In Nepal, for example, where mothers have greater ownership of land because of their inheritance rights, there are fewer severely underweight children.”
Clinton outlined the consequences of ignoring women farmers. “Close the resource gap holding women back in developing economies, and we could feed 150 million more people worldwide every year according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, and that’s in addition to the higher incomes for families and the more efficient markets and the more agricultural trade that would result.”
One of the organizations working to alter Gowramma’s situation is the National Federation of Dalit Women, which seeks to educate and organize women like her. They are pursuing legal action against caste-based atrocities. They seek political empowerment for Dalit women and plan to get it by building self-confidence in women, sharing knowledge of the law and developing leadership. “The government of India has failed in its responsibility to almost 20 percent of the population,” said its leader, Ruth Manorama. “This level of human rights deprivation is worse than racism.” Manorama was the sort of woman they needed to upset three-thousand-year-old traditions. Feisty and in-your-face, she had a lot to say. “Despite the benefits promised by the government, there’s an unholy alliance between the state and the upper castes that perpetuates a shameful level of apartheid. Police actively collude with the upper castes to perpetrate violence against Dalits.” The superiority of the upper castes is so entrenched that the abuse is sometimes no more than sport but always a reminder that in India status overrules human rights. Manorama also started another organization, Women’s Voice, to reach out to women in the slums and the villages. One of the women in her program was Gowramma.
But nasty habits die hard. A stunning report first written by Smita Narula for Human Rights Watch in 1999, and updated in 2011, exposed the Dalits’ situation to a worldwide audience. Narula found that sexual abuse and other forms of violence were used to crush dissent within the community. Women such as Gowramma, who dream of change, and other Dalits who contest political office in village councils and municipalities, vying for seats constitutionally reserved for them, are threatened with physical abuse if they persist.
It’s not as if the state is unaware of the ongoing problems. Consider the wording of the Prevention of Atrocities Act, passed in 1989, which lays out punishments “for offences such as: forcing a member of the Scheduled Caste to drink or eat any inedible or obnoxious substance; parading a person naked or with painted face; assaults on women with intent to dishonour their sexuality.”
As for the international community, even in the recent past, many development programs were designed without consulting women or considering the crucial role they played, whether it was funding agricultural training initiatives that targeted men, even though women often represented the majority of small farmers, or building wells in areas where women could not go, never mind that women were the ones responsible for fetching water.
Gross inequality is a reality in the lives of Dalits. Clearly, the caste system has to go. But unless the upper castes face real consequences under the law, they are not about to give up their power and privilege. They live in a country that not only has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world but the second-biggest population after China. Wealth is increasing in India, even as Dalits suffer in poverty. In July 2003, India even asked twenty-two countries to stop sending foreign aid, in an attempt to better its chances of joining the G7 group of countries with major economies.
Gowramma credited public pressure for slight revisions to the rules she and her neighbours lived with. They used to have to remove their sandals and the men also had to remove their shirts in the presence of the landlord. They couldn’t ride bicycles on the same street as Hindus. At one time, they could be whipped if they happened to step into the shadow of a member of the upper caste. After the rules changed, she said, an upper-caste person would give a Dalit food as long as it was on a separate plate, one that the Hindu family didn’t have to touch.
But Dalit women still suffer sexual exploitation cloaked as “religi
ous” ritual. Outlawed practices, such as Bettale Seve, nude worship, which allows upper castes to strip Dalit women and men and parade them naked through the streets, still happen. So does devadasi, the Hindu practice that in part sacrifices a young girl’s virginity to the gods to satisfy the wants of village chiefs and ward off evil spirits and bad omens.
While she was getting her sons ready to go to the Dalit-only school they attend in the village, I asked Gowramma how she untangled this injustice for her children. “I tell them, ‘You are a human being. God has not created people to be upper or lower caste. It’s people who have divided society. So, don’t you feel inferior. Go to school, study well so you can get a good job.’ ”
After the boys left for school, she sounded less optimistic. “It’s so hard,” she said quietly while breastfeeding Dikshitra. “We work so hard, get such low income, have no money for good food. We need to change this.”
As the baby drifted off to sleep in her arms, I was reminded of A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s novel about India’s untouchables, whose theme is how narrow is the distance between hope and despair. For Dalit women such as Gowramma, hope and a growing demand for justice may be the only way out of despair. It’s easy to dismiss a poor woman and her two cows as a minor problem, one that won’t solve the food shortages or human rights atrocities that the Dalits suffer. Spending time with Gowramma made it abundantly clear that it is crucial to change the rules so that a woman can milk her cows and sell the milk to people who need it and can afford to pay for it. Allowing a woman such as Gowramma to sell her milk is the way to turn poverty into production.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 percent. This increase could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 percent, or up to 150 million people.
Isobel Coleman sees a core economic argument here. “When you invest in women and girls, it’s the best way to break cycles of poverty. Poor states aren’t necessarily failed states. But it’s difficult to emerge as a peaceful functioning stable country when living in dire straits of poverty.” Her advice: “Invest in women and girls—break negative cycles and create positive cycles that would benefit the women and girls and country as a whole at a macro-economic level.”
While it’s an economic issue, Coleman says, it’s also a human rights issue. “When women are sold, bartered, neglected, aborted as baby girls, all sorts of bad things are happening in those countries—it’s a real marker for the health of the civil society, the political life, the core of the nation. Countries that stone young women or have high levels of honour crimes, or don’t allow women to take part in the social fabric, or vote, or participate as equals have a whole range of problems, the role of women being the most obvious. Women are half the population. These aren’t women’s issues, they are core economic issues, security issues, human rights issues”
The surest path to the eradication of poverty is the economic empowerment of women, who make up the majority of the world’s poor. Studies done by the International Center for Research on Women in Washington, D.C., claim that discriminating against women is economically inefficient; that national economies lose out when a substantial part of the population cannot compete equitably or realize their full potential. Gowramma’s story is ever more meaningful in the face of data that say women who are economically empowered contribute more to their families, societies and economies. They invest income in their children, which is the definition of sustainable development.
Koraro is a village in Ethiopia that was selected as a Millennium Village by Jeffrey Sachs and his Millennium Goals team to demonstrate how a little outside help could lift a village out of poverty. The Earth Institute and the UN Development Program kicked in the funds to jump-start Koraro from hardscrabble poverty—rampant malaria, no schools, no health clinics, food shortages—to development, complete with a local school, a clinic and much-improved agriculture. Although they have a distance to travel before becoming self-sustaining, Sachs credits the girls in the village with showing how the empowerment of women can lead to success for the entire village. Each year, a dozen girls were given scholarships to attend secondary school in another town. The classes included instruction in skills that led to jobs as plumbers, electricians and to improved farming techniques. Education changed their lives. Exactly as Sachs had predicted, the girls married later, had fewer children and those children are healthier. When he visited the village in 2010, he sat in the classroom while the first wave of graduates talked to primary schoolchildren about the value of getting an education. Sachs believes that these young women will improve Koraro’s education level and create new jobs along the way.
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That was the sort of successful experiment that caught the attention of Margot Franssen, a businesswoman who brought the Body Shop franchise to Canada. “When women aren’t included in the conversation, in equal rights, when they don’t have the whole menu of opportunity, it affects the entire world. We need to invest money in women and girls so they can sit at the table and bring their voices to the table. We need the men too.”
She believes that too many people, from government representatives to corporate bosses, still simply don’t get it; they don’t understand the big picture—how important it is to invest in women and girls. “People believe if you buy someone a cow you settle poverty. If you have a shelter built that’s the end of violence. That’s like saying, ‘We have an emergency ward so we don’t need the hospital.’ People like simplistic solutions but we need to look at this in a more holistic manner.”
Franssen became the co-chair of an organization called Women Moving Millions (WMM) for precisely that reason. “In my life of dealing with business and commerce and funding women and girls,” she says, “I discovered that just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s moral, and just because it’s moral doesn’t mean it’ll be put into law. No amount of laws will make women strong. We need to step in and give them a voice.” WMM funds women in impressive numbers and at significant levels: millions of dollars. Women of means in Canada and the United States pledge $1 million each to fund organizations that are moving women into a world of self-sufficiency. Franssen gave her pledge money to the Canadian Women’s Foundation (CWF), an organization whose motto is “the power of women and the dreams of girls,” so it can research, fund and share the best approaches to ending violence against women, moving low-income women out of poverty and building strong, resilient girls.
WMM started in 2007 with a goal to raise $150 million for the advancement of women and girls. Franssen remembers, “Everyone said you’re crazy, you’ll never make it. By 2009, when the rest of the world was falling to pieces, we had raised $185 million. Now we’re realizing we should be thinking billions. It’s not about us deciding where the money will go, it’s us saying if you really want to invest well, give your money to an organization that promotes women and girls.”
She supports CWF because she’s seen that it makes a significant difference in the lives of women and girls. When, for instance, it funded Aboriginal women in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who wanted to become carpenters, it was unheard of that women would join the union of carpenters in the province. Even while they were apprenticing, the women feared they’d never get jobs. With CWF funds over a five-year period, they put together a co-op carpenter company and hired themselves out. In short order, all thirteen newly qualified female carpenters were fully booked. They eventually disbanded the co-op but only to go on to work for developers and renovators, having built careers for themselves. The cost of helping these women was a fraction of what it would have cost the state to subsidize them with social assistance.
“Through CWF, we fund the most marginalized people in our society,” says Franssen. “One woman in Niagara Falls, Ontario, who had been abused by her husband was
out on her own without work and wondering how to make ends meet when she came to us with a plan. She knew how to preserve food and was making jellies and jams. We funded her. She’s now the CEO of Niagara Presents, a hugely successful company that hires women who come from the same situation as she was in.”
There’s another CWF initiative that draws particular attention among businesswomen in Toronto. The foundation released the plan as an IPO (initial public offering) and invited women to join. Here’s how it works. The organization’s research established that it takes $2500 to launch a woman out of poverty, much less than the cost of paying welfare over her lifetime. So CWF set a goal to raise $2500 from each participant to launch twenty-five hundred women out of poverty. It became a wildly successful program, pitched each year by Margot Franssen, who stood up in front of about a thousand women at one of those ghastly early-morning breakfast fundraisers and begged: “Come on—it’s $41 a month on your Visa. That’s less than a pedicure.” CWF met its goal in three and a half years, raising more than $6 million. Franssen says, “Women are looked at as a problem. We need to look at them as an asset—their inner strength, intuition, their smarts and their ability to nurture and see into the future. I believe that things are changing for women and girls. The last decade has shown us that. We’re becoming a bigger voice and are using that voice.”
Speaking of the corporate women who come to those CWF breakfasts, research shows a correlation between the number of women on boards and higher corporate profits. One analysis found that companies with more women board directors outperform those with the least by 66 percent return on invested capital, by 53 percent return on equity, and 42 percent return on sales. Another study indicates that one-third of executives reported increased profits as a result of investments in employing women in emerging markets.
In the United States, the productivity gains attributable to the modest 11 percent increase in women’s overall share of the labour market over the past forty years, as documented in the McKinsey report mentioned above, accounts for approximately one-quarter of the country’s current GDP. The dollar amount is more than $3.5 trillion—more than the GDP of Germany, and more than half the GDPs of China and Japan.
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