Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Recasting Citizenship for Women’s Livelihood and Development 25
envisage the kind of asset ownership that Datar attempted through
Maharashtra’s EGS. Her attempt to mobilise the women of Osmanabad
in drought-prone Marathwada for a collective horticulture scheme was
received with scepticism because the poor landless women could not
imagine themselves owning an orchard; in their minds, they were labourers,
not entrepreneurs.
Democratic Governance and Institutional Systems
In the early 1950s, independent India’s nationwide Community Development
(CD) Programme had attempted to establish a decentralised
administrative system centred around community institutions inspired
both by the Gandhian philosophy of Sarvodaya and various initiatives to
improve agricultural production (Krishna 2001). The aim was to integrate
all aspects of rural life in a holistic process of social and economic
transformation. The First Five-Year Plan had emphasised the internalisation
of development processes through people’s involvement. By the
mid-1960s, however, the CD structure and functions were taken over by
the bureaucracy and it was more than two decades later that ‘community
participation’ re-entered the development discourse. Although the CD
programme aimed to include all men and women, there was resistance
on account of caste and gender differentiation. Because the CD model
itself was ‘constituted by structures of power which had socialised women
into silent nurturing, these voices were not heard’ (ibid.: 31). Yet, even
within the patriarchal structures of patronage, certain collective spaces
were created for and by women (such as the mahila mandals in different
states). The contemporary version of community participation has followed
two different trajectories. At one level, it has taken the route of political
decentralisation through the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), in which
one-third of all seats are reserved for women under the Constitution
(73rd Amendment) Act, 1992, and the Panchayati Raj (Extension to the
Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), 1996. At another level, the explosive growth
of NGOs as intermediaries between the communities and the state has
effectively de-politicised development. The withdrawal of the state from
many areas of development in the 1990s has led to a tussle for space between
the elected PRIs and ‘civil society’ NGOs.