Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

17
Women’s Development under Patriarchy 367
Women’s Development under Patriarchy
The Experience of the Sathins
Rajesh Ramakrishnan, Viren Lobo and
Depinder Kapur
The following article∗ was written in the mid-1990s when we were working
in a Delhi-based NGO that supported grassroots NGOs. This was a time
when there was a great deal of introspection among NGOs in Delhi following
several incidents of summary dismissal of staff by some leading
NGOs. It was a time for reflection on the changing role of NGOs, the position
of NGOs vis-à-vis the state, employer-employee relationships in NGOs
and the work content of NGO staff. Around the same time, the Women’s
Development Programme in Rajasthan was also the subject of intense
debate among NGOs and activists. The first piece of literature that we
came across, which raised fundamental questions about women’s development
by a state-led programme was Saheli et al. (1993). This encouraged
us to look at the Programme deeper. We were working and travelling extensively
in Rajasthan during this period, and also personally knew activists
of the Sathin Karmachari Sangh. Our sympathies lay with the sathins,
whose courageous struggles greatly inspired us, and also illuminated our
own life-positions with all their contradictions. This note was both an
exercise in self-clarification, and of communication to our colleagues
in the NGO sector about the ideological mists in the development sector.
The sathins and their organisation taught us that these mists cannot be
just analysed away, they have to be challenged through collective action.
That lesson retains its validity today.
∗ This chapter, a piece of grey literature from the past, is being published as written a decade
ago. A postscript brings it up to date. —Editor