Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Women’s Development under Patriarchy 383
and an enhanced wage would erode the spirit of seva (service) in the
work and alienate them from fellow villagers. This line of argument has
often been heard by NGO workers when they demand a raise in salaries.
Those worthies who put forth this argument pretend not to understand
that in a capitalist society like ours, even the spirit of service cannot but
become a commodity with a price, for seva too is labour and in order to
continue supplying it, the sevika/sevak (one who serves) needs means of
sustenance. For their own seva, the Project Directors and IDARA coordinators
were on regular scales, earning twice as much in a month as a
sathin would in a year.
The struggle, thus, became a basic class struggle over arriving at a just
wage, that is, the price of a special form of labour in capitalist society.
WDP officials (both government and NGO) then pulled out the next
item from their unending bag of tricks. The very nature of the functions
a sathin was supposed to perform made it difficult to gauge the amount of
time she would need to spend in fulfilling these. Further, the outcome
of her work could not always be measured because these were based on
intangibles such as the village women gaining confidence in themselves,
and changes in their status in their own eyes and in those of the family, the
village. The WDP now began drawing inapt comparisons between the highly
skill-intensive work of the sathins and the work of anganwadi workers
who had quantifiable, repetitive tasks. The argument now was that since
the sathins had no ‘defined’ work, their meagre honoraria were justified.
This was then further justified by changing the nature of the sathin’s work
by adding on routine tasks of welfare delivery and diluting the training
component, thereby striking at the very root of the programme—the skill
of the sathins as organisers.
Sathins quickly saw through the argument that their work was not
‘defined’. Since the dawn of patriarchal society, the work of women within
the household (that is, child rearing, cooking and all housekeeping activities
extending to tending of livestock and the homestead farm) has been
relegated to the status of a private activity as opposed to the public activity
of productions (agricultural or otherwise) engaged in by men. Capitalism,
which seeks to buy labour power at the lowest possible wage, has used
this patriarchal division of men’s and women’s labour to cheapen the
wage of any home-based production activity undertaken by women. Since
the WDP viewed the sathin as a ‘volunteer’ working in her own village, her