Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

388 RAJESH RAMAKRISHNAN, VIREN LOBO AND DEPINDER KAPUR
than a carefully thought-out design. At the same time, the WDP structure
had been weakened by the state government to such an extent that it could
not carry out its core functions (GoR 2002: 12–17, 20–21).
The review team found unclear usage of a number of concepts. ‘Economic
empowerment’ was used synonymously with ‘economic activity’
and ‘economic self-reliance’ in the context of women. Policy makers and
planners looked at SHGs as mechanisms for women’s economic empowerment
because they made credit available for economic activities. Members
of SHGs received information, resources and inputs only for financial
services. Social mobilisation, awareness, or information on legal rights
was not part of the information flow at all. Words such as ‘convergence’,
‘integration’ and ‘merger’ were insufficiently differentiated in their
scope in the context of programmes for women. The ‘merger’ of WDP
and ICDS in 2000 was found to have created confusion in the work content
of project directors, prachetas and sathins in different districts. The review
team believed the merger was dictated by a resource crunch in the WDP
budget rather than any considered policy decision. According to the sathins,
serious issues that require sustained mobilisation have been adversely
affected by these changes (GoR 2002: 15–16).
Despite all this, the review team said, ‘If work is still being done at the
grassroots—and we found plenty of evidence of this—it is because the
energy of the sathins, built up through the training, information, communication
and other supports in the earlier phase of the programme,
has still not completely dissipated’ (GoR 2002: 13). It was only in the villages
with sathins that the review team found ground rules in place for
lending and borrowing in SHGs—no loans for marriages or ostentatious
consumption, encouragement of loans for putting girls in schools, for
treating illnesses, for childbirth expenses, and domestic emergencies.
The team finally advised the state government to use the lessons from
the WDP to develop a critical understanding of the impact of development
interventions on poor women and their families, as WDP was the only
programme to have a distinctive understanding of and approach to empowerment
of women, as well as a dedicated delivery system. The mere
recruitment of more sathins by the state government would be inadequate,
and the indivisibility of the sathins and other programme support structures
had to be understood. Ad hoc efforts to involve WDP functionaries
in ICDS III would be ineffective without reviewing the reasons for the