Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Women’s Development under Patriarchy 377
had to fight for their rights along with other women of their communities.
Now the long hours of work at low pay and shabby treatment by their
superiors made them conscious of their identities as workers who were
being denied their rights. The need to have their own union was keenly
felt, and the actual steps were initiated by the Mahila Samooh Kekri and
the Mahila Samooh Ajmer. (Some of the activists who had left WDP were
members of the Ajmer group.) By July 1993, a state-level sathins’ union
was formed, which began a programme of staging dharnas at the district
headquarters and held meetings with MLAs and ministers to press their
demands for better pay and terms of work. A prachetas’ union was also
formed in 1992.
The response of the WDP authorities to the unionisation was similar
to that of any management against their workers’ unions. Tactics of intimidation
and blandishment were used alternately. In Ajmer, letters were
sent to the husbands of sathins asking them to allow the women to leave
their homes only if they received official letters with WDP seals. So much
for women’s emancipation! There had been attempts to break the unity
of the sathins by selectively choosing some of them for Lok Jumbish programmes
on a daily allowance of Rs 50. A rift was sought to be created
between sathins and prachetas through the character assassination of
prachetas, often by using other prachetas as agents. Large-scale sathin
jajams were disallowed, and even large-scale celebrations of International
Women’s Day were disallowed.
In 1991, seven years after the commencement of the WDP, the authorities
woke up to the fact that the post of pracheta was a tenure post and
according to the existing rules, the tenure of service of most prachetas
had expired. They were asked to re-apply and in the process of re-selection,
three militant prachetas (who had served the WDP for two to seven years)
were dropped. It may be mentioned here that the strictly illegal practice
of contractual appointment was also extended to the lower-level office
staff of the DWDAs, many of whom challenged this in court.
CHANGE IN THE STRUCTURE OF
THE PROGRAMME
The response to the growing militancy of the sathins and the prachetas
was a change in the structure of the programme. It was decided to not fill