Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Recasting Citizenship for Women’s Livelihood and Development 27
form a vast institutional system geared towards enhancing productivity
through a ‘unidisciplinary mode of research and technology transfer’ that
excludes women’s agricultural knowledge and skills. The question is not
just of including women farmers in policy and programmes, but of understanding
that the agricultural network is a ‘gendered institution’ that is
especially resistant to change. Advocacy for ‘gender mainstreaming’
remains at the level of rhetoric, serving to mask the instrumentalist approach
of the state and interests of the elite. Similarly, Seema Kulkarni
(Chapter 11, this volume) points out that the new water policy environment
seeks solutions to the water crisis through institutional reforms
such as the decentralisation of resource management, but is resistant to
women’s ‘potential to challenge the existing property relations and the
division of labour’. So, although women are accepted as members of village
drinking water and sanitation committees, they are unrepresented
in the water user associations (WUAs) whose membership depends on
holding land in the command areas of a particular irrigation project,
thereby effectively keeping out women and the landless. She says the real
issue for women is not just more access to water, but ‘to demand a space
that can challenge the structures of patriarchy’. Indeed, grassroots women’s
movements in southern Maharashtra are doing this (see Kulkarni 2005).
In many parts of India the ‘elite capture’ of state resources has led to
the emergence of a speculative land market, especially in rural areas in the
vicinity of urban centres. This has led to the encroachment and usurpation
of common lands, affecting poor women’s access to land and common
productive resources. The question of women’s individual and collective
right to land has rarely been taken up within local struggles on the ground,
and this is so across the political spectrum. However, research that has
grown out of the women’s movement has underlined the importance of
land ownership to enhance women’s power to take decisions within the
family. The extensive work done by Agarwal (1994) has shown that ownership
of and control over land is the single most important economic factor
in women’s well-being and empowerment. More recent work (Panda and
Agarwal 2005) shows that women’s ownership of land has a positive impact
on reducing domestic violence. Land ownership is also critical in
facilitating access to farm credit and other inputs. Women’s subordinate
position in relation to men forms the basis of various Hindu laws related
to marriage, adoption and the succession or guardianship of children.