Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Women’s Development under Patriarchy 375
centralised policy planning and a top-down approach reappeared. The
sathin, who was earlier viewed by WDP as an agent of social change through
chetna jagran (awareness raising), began to be viewed as a mere functionary
of mainstream development programmes. There was a substantial
increase in her workload and the time spent on her work, the nature of
which changed from awareness raising to meeting the targets of opening
women’s bank accounts, participating in awareness campaigns of other
government departments and mobilising women to attend them, meeting
targets of girls’ enrolment in schools, of women’s immunisation and sterilisation,
et cetera. The sathin’s performance assessment now began to be
based on how well she fulfilled targets. Village communities also began
demanding of the sathin services ranging from information about governmental
procedures to the repair of hand pumps and distribution of rations.
The sathin was supposed to be doing WDP work in her spare time, but
even though the increase in workload necessitated frequent travel and
loss of income due to missed work, the sathins’ honorarium remained at
Rs 250 per month despite persistent demands for an increase. The NCW
report said that in the districts where WDP had just begun, the empowerment
component was being neglected and there was a reversal to the old
view of women as passive beneficiaries of welfare schemes, which was the
original point of departure for WDP in 1984.
In the districts covered earlier, the increasing emphasis on the achievement
of tangible results and fast expansion had led to the essential component
of training and monitoring being weakened. At the district level,
the character of the DWDA had changed. While the earlier emphasis was
on choosing Project Directors with experience in women’s issues (with
further gender-sensitisation if necessary), these qualifications had later
been given the go-by. New projects had been loaded on to the DWDA,
like the Lok Jumbish, anti-AIDS campaigns, literacy missions and campaigns
for the girl child. Consequently, responsiveness to field situations
and two-way interaction in the form of village visits by Project Directors,
letters to sathins by Project Directors, et cetera, had virtually ceased.
If this was the situation within the DWDAs, the situation in the NGOs
(IDARAs) was no better. Here, too, new personnel had been selected without
regard to their experience in women’s issues, and no real orientation
was provided after they were appointed. Earlier, IDARAs used to conduct
training programmes for sathins spread over a period of one month; these