Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Recasting Citizenship for Women’s Livelihood and Development 21
largely due to government expenditure on relief works and the creation
of jobs (see Sen 1996). In the 1990s, with the advent of new economic
policies and the reduction of government expenditures, poverty levels
stagnated, with the exception of parts of western and southern India,
although pockets of poverty continued to persist even in these better-off
regions. Poverty has been linked to increasing inequality. Sen and
Himanshu (2004) point out that the ‘big picture’ is that ‘the 1990s was the
first post-Independence decade when economic inequality increased
sharply in all its dimensions’. (In their analysis, inequality had increased in
rural areas during the post-Green Revolution period too, but there was ‘a
tendency for relative food prices to fall’ and from the mid-1970s through
the 1990s rural inequality decreased. With growth, this led to a fall in
poverty levels during that period.) Disparities increased after the early
1990s as food prices increased. Sen and Himanshu (ibid.) further say
that ‘high initial poverty and population growth seem to have ensured that
India’s growth revival after 1992 has largely bypassed the poor. The relatively
rich did gain and some states did perform better than the others’.
They have little doubt that the number of poor increased in the most
populated regions, and they see the large shift in the 1990s from food to
non-food expenditure, such as on fuel, medicines and conveyance, even
among the poor, as indicative of a ‘worsening nutrition situation’. This
strengthens their argument against excluding numbers of the poor from
food subsidies.
According to the 2001 Census, in India as a whole, 52 per cent of males
reported themselves as ‘workers’ compared to only 25 per cent of females.
However, only 58 per cent of the male workers were engaged in agriculture
and allied occupations, compared to nearly 80 per cent of the female workers.
This confirms the casual observations from across the country that
the burden of agriculture is shifting to women (a trend that has been termed
as the ‘feminisation of agriculture’); in certain areas, such as in parts of
north-eastern India, this burden is increasingly being borne almost entirely
by older women (Krishna 1998a, 1998b, 2005). The National Sample
Surveys (NSSs) provide a more comprehensive coverage of work, but
neither the NSS nor the census accurately reflects the extent of women’s
work (see Krishna 2001; Raju 1993; Jhabvala et al. 2003, Krishna 2004a):
household chores, home-based work and informal labour in subsistence
dairying, livestock rearing, fishing, hunting, cultivating fruit and vegetable