Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

348 SHOBHITA RAJAGOPAL
Addressing Citizenship, Livelihoods and Gender Equality
through Planned Interventions
The concept of citizenship and its relationship to development (and to
gender) is not straightforward and not necessarily positive. Development
policy and practice over the past two decades have tried to address the
needs of the poor and the marginalised with varying degrees of success.
Since the 1980s, when questions related to women’s marginalisation in
policy and disempowerment in the social, economic and political spheres
gained centrality, several interventions were conceived, which laid
emphasis on ‘empowerment’ as a crucial ingredient for positing change.
On the other hand, a number of anti-poverty programmes targeted women
to provide wage employment, productive assets, skills, and credit and
food security. However, experience indicates that these efforts have not
succeeded in reducing poverty to the extent necessary. In recent times,
the stress has been on applying strong participatory principles for better
results.
Mobilising for Social Change: The Women’s Development Project
(WDP): The WDP was implemented by the Government of Rajasthan in
1984 with the principal aim of ‘empowering women through communication
of information, education and training and to enable them to
recognise and improve their social and economic status’ (GoR 1984). Influenced
by feminist and liberal discourse, the objective of the programme
was to transform the approach to women’s issues from one of being
powerless and treated with compassion, to operating as equal partners
with male members of the family in terms of literacy and in all spheres—
cultural, social and economic (Clarke and Jha 2006). The project was initially
implemented in six districts of the state with UNICEF support. The
beginning of such a development intervention in an extremely feudal
Rajasthan was radical, a daring attempt to go to the very roots of the problem
of deprivation and subordination of women.
The programme attempted to provide a micro-level alternative and
compensate for the institutional failure of the state to meet women’s needs
and priorities. It was not a service delivery programme with ‘targets’ or
distribution of material resources. The stress was on intangible resources,
such as training-education, communication of information and building
supportive networks, with a view to improving women’s longer-term access