Unaware of their legal rights and entitlements, women farmers end up suffering. That’s what many years of fieldwork in the environmentally sensitive, agriculture-dependent region of Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh have taught Archana Srivastava, the 40-year-old Advocacy Coordinator at Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG).
And she understands this all the more acutely as she herself belongs to a rural family from the neighbouring Mau district. Not only is the region prone to both drought and flood, it’s natural resources have traditionally ‘belonged’ to the local feudal landlords. The only viable recourse available to vulnerable communities, particularly landless women farmers, are the various government employment and livelihood schemes, but their experiences on ground did not inspire confidence.
At the GEAG’s modest, but well-equipped training centre for farmers in Campierganj, on the Gorakhpur-Sonauli highway to Nepal, about 35 km from Gorakhpur city, Archana dwells on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA): “A scheme like the MNREGA has all the potential of being a real boon, but it has been rendered meaningless as people, especially women, don’t really know how to benefit from it.”
Initially introduced in 200 most-backward districts in 2006, the scheme has since been rolled out across the country. It provides at least 100 days of wage work — unskilled manual labour — to adult members of a rural household. The processes are straightforward — applications are submitted to the Gram Panchayat (local self-government) office, after which a job card with photograph is issued. If no work can be found within 15 days, the applicant is entitled to an unemployment allowance. Importantly, at least one third of those given work should be women.
Ideally, this intervention should have proved the perfect solution for agricultural communities affected by climate change, as it guarantees wage work during the off-season, while also helping create beneficial local infrastructure. In reality, however, the scheme’s inherent promise remains unrealised, marred by rampant corruption, discrimination and misinformation.
Putla Devi, a landless farmer, was aware of the scheme but didn’t know how to access it. “Until about five years ago, women like me didn’t know how to approach the panchayat for work under MNREGA. In fact, I did not even know that I could ask for a widow’s pension, a kisan credit card, or a one-room house under the Indira Awaas Yojana,” she says. She hails from a small hamlet in Sant Kabir Nagar district, which lies east of Gorakhpur, where Archana’s work amongst the poorest of poor is supported by GEAG and the Poorest Area Civil Society Programme (PACS). Here, 24 per cent of the population is Muslim and 21 per cent dalit. Putla Devi remembers a time when the poor like her only got to hear about government schemes during election time.
In 2008, after she met Archana, things started looking up for her. The activist talks in chaste Bhojpuri to Putla Devi and other landless, small and marginal farmers — who form about 72 per cent of UP’s agrarian workforce — about their entitlements and sustainable agricultural practices. At GEAG’s training centre, Putla Devi learned from experts about ecologically viable models of agriculture in the face of drastic changes in weather patterns.
Once their confidence was won, the farmers organised themselves into the Laghu Seemant Krishak Morcha (Small Marginal Farmers’ Union), an independent body registered under the Trade Union Act. As local activist Satyendra Kumar Tripathi explains, “GEAG has helped farmers engage in a positive dialogue with the government, donors and other likeminded institutions. The forum’s focus is on the sustainability of agriculture for small holding farmers, reduction of input costs, and assistance in the form of non-chemical bio inputs, market access and rational support prices.”
Adds Archana, “This is an example of a new micro-planning model in which grassroots-level community institutions are at the heart of the interactions.” She believes such a bottom-up approach alone can fill the huge gap between what national policymakers advocate and the solutions needed at the ground level. “In a rural setting, every problem is unique but there has been a tendency so far to apply the same solution to all problems — an attitude that has made millions of poor people poorer in villages and rendered programmes like the MNREGA ineffective,” she observes.
And Archana is certainly no stranger to the fight for rights. In fact, had not her mother stood by her decision to enter university for higher studies, Archana could not have embarked on a career path. At first, she had wanted to become a doctor to care for the poor, but when medical education proved to be too challenging and expensive she took up social work instead and eventually earned a postgraduate degree in rural studies.
“To this day my parents and brothers do not understand the work I do. While they are familiar with an advocate, advocacy puzzles them!” smiles the woman who has groomed a cadre of more than 60 rural master-trainers, many of them women, who talk to local communities on issues such as women’s right to property and their recognition as farmers. They also help form self-help groups. For a moderate fee, the trainers branch out to villages to spread awareness.
Archana’s energies are currently focused on an ongoing campaign, Aroh, which enables women to gain recognition as farmers, own agricultural land, and gain access to institutional credit, new technologies and government programmes. On in 71 districts across the State, the campaign aims to formulate, and eventually get the State to adopt, a pro-farmer agriculture policy developed by farmers themselves.
These are indeed tough times for the agrarian community, with climate change completely transforming their way of living and working. For women like Putla Devi, the struggles are amplified because, unlike their male counterparts, they are not equipped to handle the consequences of change. And that’s where the work of activists like Archana promises to make a crucial difference.
As Archana points out, “Even if the life of one farmer is improved, it can have a cascading effect.”
© Women’s Feature Service