Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

The Sangha Mané 297
participate in medical camps, and awareness camps on dowry, rape,
alcoholism and widow remarriage. In Agasanahalli and Kurukunda, they
ensure that the anganwadi programme is running efficiently. (This initiative
under the Integrated Child Development Scheme provides nutrition
to pregnant women, lactating mothers and preschool children, and educational
and socialisation inputs for the children.) In Kurukunda, they have
created a nari adalat (women’s court) programme. In Dotihalla, they run
Non-Formal Education (NFE) classes. They rear sheep and grow mushrooms.
In Banikuppe, the women have helped set up an okutta (federation)
office in Hunsur. The health committee is involved in keeping the borewell
surroundings clean.
All the sanghas felt the need for a space to run these programmes efficiently.
Therefore, it becomes relevant to examine the different reasons
for building the sangha manés.
Reasons for Building a Sangha Mané
Almost uniformly, women from all the sanghas declared, ‘We had no space
to conduct our meetings’. The women would conduct their meetings in
public places, that is, the Samudaya Bhavan, temples, in a sangha woman’s
house, schools, and sometimes even on the roadside or near the garbage
dump. All these locations were open to the public, and hence did not
provide them with any privacy. The men would hang around, smoke
beedis, drink, and even throw stones at the women. They would taunt
the women and cast aspersions on their character. Further, some of these
places did not have a roof, so during the rainy seasons their meetings
would get disrupted. The women would move from place to place, seeking
some measure of privacy. Given all these factors, even the MSK team
found it difficult to conduct meetings. This left the women highly
frustrated, as they felt that the existence of the sangha was in jeopardy.
Apart from not being able to hold meetings, the women wanted their
own space to run the other activities. This indicates that the women felt
the sanghas could not be sustained without a private and independent
space of their own.
Sangha manés, therefore, feature in the realm of felt needs, as the women
themselves articulated this requirement. A series of complex processes
unfolded once the decision to build a ‘space of one’s own’ was taken.