Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

198 DEEPAK K. MISHRA AND VANDANA UPADHYAY
land, are privatised. Generally, the inheritance laws of the communities
of Arunachal Pradesh do not allow women to inherit landed property
(Pandey et al. 1997).
Livelihoods in Arunachal Pradesh, like in many other states of the
Northeast are critically dependent upon ‘environmental entitlements’. 21
A study based on a household-level primary survey in four villages of
West Kameng district 22 found that almost all the households rely on
multiple sources of livelihoods. In the study villages, the significance
of the forest resources lies in their centrality as an additional and dependable
source of livelihood, particularly for smoothening consumption,
so as to remove fluctuations. 23 Needless to say, women and children play
an important role in gathering forest resources for both domestic consumption
and commercial use. The declining forest cover, particularly
the degradation of forest near the settlements, has meant extra work.
Participation in non-farm agricultural labour markets, especially for the
rural poor, is not in terms of a permanent occupational shift, but can be
explained as being among the ‘livelihood gathering’ efforts on the part of
the deficit households. The large and semi-medium farmers, on the other
hand, concentrate more on agriculture, trade and commerce activities.
There is a gender dimension to this process as well—when male workers in
small and marginal holder families move out to non-farm activities like
government service or petty business, female workers tend to spend a
comparatively higher percentage of their working days on farming and
forest activities. Another micro-study found that while male workers tend
to spend a higher percentage of their working days as agricultural wage
labourers, the trend is reversed in the case of the percentage of working
days spent in all types of wage labour, both agricultural and nonagricultural,
because of the relatively higher participation of female
workers in the non-farm wage labour market (Mishra 2002a). Given
the substantial dependence of women on forest resources and related
activities, the weakening of the institutional management of these communally-owned
and managed resources obviously has significant gender
implications as well (Krishna 2001). 24 For all their so-called ‘democratic
ethos’, these traditional institutions for the management of CPRs were
completely male-dominated.
Over the past decades, a large number of migrant women workers
have been working in various sectors in Arunachal Pradesh. Many of them