Essays On Gender And Governance - United Nations Development ...

Gender and Governance : Concepts and Contexts
However it was only with the 73rd and 74th Constitution
Amendments in 1992 that panchayat elections (to be held every
five years) were mandated throughout the country. The reforms
called for reservations of 33 per cent of the seats for women and
for scheduled castes and tribes proportional to their population.
Elections across the country brought over 700,000 women to power
once the panchayat reforms were implemented in April 1993. With
a few exceptions, most states met and some exceeded the 33 per
cent women’s reservations at all three levels.
Given the fact that the panchayat reforms were the product of
government fiat, the extent to which women benefited from these
reforms depended upon their prior history of activism.
The most successful women panchayat members contested the
elections and won as a result of prior political activism, sometimes
well before the government reforms. In 1989, men and women,
who had been active in the Shetkari Sangathana farmers’ movement
in Maharashtra, nominated seven all women panels to contest the
gram panchayat elections. Five panels were elected. Women were
also a majority of those elected to the two other panchayats.
In Vitner, one of the villages in Jalgaon district, Maharashtra, a
nine-woman panel stood for the elections from three wards,
defeating a male dominated Shiv Sena backed alternative. One of
the panchayat’s early decisions was to instruct women to let their
cattle graze on 52 acres of property that outsiders from the village
had encroached upon. It then turned the reclaimed land into a
community orchard and kept proceeds in a panchayat fund. The
panchayat subsequently organized villagers to fight for women’s
land rights and persuaded 127 of the 271 families in the village to
make women co-owners of the family property, ranging from one
to six acres.
The case of the Vitner panchayat is especially impressive for
the measures it took to improve the well being of the community,
and particularly of women, far exceeded the powers that the state
had delegated it. The Vitner women’s panchayat built seven rooms
in the tribal quarters of the village and added two school rooms to
the existing structure. Before women came to power, the village
school taught only until the sixth grade. It now provides an
additional year of education. The panchayat got installed 29
electricity poles to the existing thirty. It also acquired a water tank,
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