Caracterización estructural y espacio-temporal de los manglares de Old Point Regional

Case 1:

One Woman‘s Entrepreneurial Venture Now Employs Thousands

Shameema Wani‘s simple venture, begun from scratch grew into the 2,000-strong business enterprise, employing mainly women, that it is today in this capital city of India‘s disputed Jammu and Kashmir state.

When her husband had an accident in1990, leaving him incapacitated for gainful work, Wani figured it was time to put her college education to good use by setting up a small business.

Using what little was left of her family‘s resources after her husband‘s costly treatment, she bought a sack of ‗pashmina‘ from Leh – capital of the Himalayan kingdom in Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir – to make shawls.

Almost two decades on, the college dropout‘s initial foray into business has grown into a major enterprise that provides livelihood for thousands of women in her village and elsewhere in the Indian state.

When her business had grown big enough, she thought it was time she started hiring other women in her village to work for her. "I felt this job was quite suited to women, who could still do their chores at home while earning part-time," she reasons.

Soon even women from outside her village started coming to her, because they needed work. Now they are earning 2,500 to 4,000 Indian rupees (around 55 to 89 U.S. dollars) a month from making shawls.

Not that trying times are over. Seeing how pashmina manufacturers and traders are exploiting the laborers, she wants to put up her own shawl factory. This would be in addition to the Wani Pashmina Katayee Centre that she set up in 1993. Here her workers bring their processed pashminas.

Traders, she says, pay her only one Indian rupee (less than 1 U.S. cent) per pashmina knot instead of the more realistic price of 20 Indian rupees (about half a U.S. dollar). "That is too miniscule," she says. "This prompted me to think of putting up my own shawl-manufacturing unit."

103 Today, the Wani Pashmina Katayee Centre is flourishing.

Not one to sit on her laurels, Wani has also begun to trade in other commodities, namely, Kashmiri almonds and cosmetic products. Women find it more convenient to buy items for their special needs at Wani‘s outlet than elsewhere in the male-dominated market, she says.

By dint of hard work and firm determination, Wani has achieved her dream. She sees no reason why other women cannot do the same and turn into successful entrepreneurs.

Case 2:

Bimla Devi, a young dalit woman from Nagal Teju village in Haryana, has managed to ensure safe motherhood and deliveries in her village. She has got the upper and lower castes drinking water from the same tap. She has prevented a child marriage. And she has spread awareness about gender equality and Panchayati raj.

Every afternoon in Nagal Teju village in Rewari District in Haryana, a group of about 20 young women get together and sit and chant the name of god.

These women are brought together by a Dalit woman, Bimla Devi, ostensibly to take part in a kirtan (hymn-singing session). Her aim: To share information with them about reproductive and sexual health and laws that affect them. At the same time these women are also told about the importance of voting in elections, the significance of economic empowerment and gender equality.

Says 29-year-old Bimla who is helping this group of Dalit women under the Haryana state government scheme called Sanjivani: "Women in our villages have time for everything but for looking after their health. Moreover, ours is a very closed society where women don't talk openly about their health problems. But I saw women going to the temple on every Tuesday to pray and I thought of having a prayer meeting in my house every week."

Once the women became interested in the prayers, Bimla introduced the subject of their health.

A cobbler by caste, Bimla has many other firsts to her credit. Bimla protested against people of her caste not being allowed to drink water from the same tap as the Thakurs. Thanks to her

104 efforts, today both the upper and lower-caste people in the village use the same tap for drinking water.

A few months ago, Bimla was also instrumental in stopping a child marriage in her village by persuading the parents that they were not doing the right thing. Taking her endeavours further, Bimla, who has studied till Class 8, has also come up with books on the subject of reproductive health which are passed on by her core group to other women so that the message of safe motherhood can be spread further.

Successful in influencing even the men, Bimla has awakened the Dalit Panchayat members to their responsibilities and convinced them not to sign any papers without being fully aware of their contents.

Now Bimla has another mission in life - to remove the barriers that exist between the Thakurs and the Dalits in her village. And As a first step, Bimla has joined hands with a local non-governmental organisation (NGO) where she accompanies peer educators to talk to upper-caste adolescent girls so that along with talking about health, she can also start sensitising them about the issue of caste.

Case 3:

Sally Holkar, the woman behind Women Weave, a voluntary organisation that seeks to address the concerns of women weavers in India

Sally Holkar, best known for her work in reviving the handloom traditions of the famous Maheshwari saris of Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh, is now concentrating her efforts on Women Weave, an NGO that seeks to address the concerns of women weavers, who are both the ‗repository of handloom traditions‘ and victims of discrimination within the sector. Holkar is also involved with Synergy Weave, a venture that combines the skills, techniques and materials of three famous handloom-weaving centres -- Kota in Rajasthan and Maheshwar and Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh.

It started in 1978 and when she left the organisation in 2000 it had 120 looms and its gross sales for that year was one and-a-half crores. About 20% of its gross profits are spent on health, education and housing for the weaving community. It runs a housing colony, a medical programme and a school.

105

―To bring about sustainability without our intervention, we have run several different programmes.

One of them is called Young Weavers. So, we have a scheme that deals with you as the educated young weaver. We will try to sustain your traditional skills and we will try to nurture your newly acquired skills too and see how they fit together. We also work with designers, customers and weavers to sustain that interaction‖ says Sally.

We are no longer only involved with Maheshwar. We are working towards creating partnerships between weavers and weavers, between master weavers and weavers, and between all of these people and the market. Our job is not to produce and sell goods but to ‗hand-hold‘, at different levels, throughout the process. We are looking to have, in any given year, about five partners. Two of them have to be what we call advance-level partners who are qualified and excel in the areas we have earmarked. Of the remaining three, one should be a beginner and two at the middle level.

But we also tell them that we will deal with them only on one condition: that they involve the women of their community at whatever level is feasible -- not only sitting at the loom but also in quality control, dyeing, sourcing of raw materials, interacting with customers and designers, etc.

So they (the women) are required to learn things, be it graphics or designing or marketing, because all of these are exercises they must become involved in. We feel that if women don‘t become involved now in a very important way, the handloom sector will die. Simply because they (women) are the repository of this tradition and because the men are going to move on, become truck drivers or peons in offices or go away to cities or whatever.

We also try to lobby for equal pay for men and women. We are trying to enable small, friendly family groups to become micro businesses on their own. If they become micro businesses, then we can get micro finance for them.

Case 4:

The building blocks of change

Belaku Trust started as a small health research project in rural Karnataka, in 1995. One of its founders, Dr Saraswathy Ganapathy, a paediatrician turned public health professional, recalls how bleak the project appeared then. ―The women wouldn‘t speak to us, or even look at us. The nutritionist came out from the first health session and wondered how to talk ‗calories‘ to them.‖ But

106 soon, she says, they understood that they were also in Kanakapura to learn and grow. ―We came in thinking we knew all the answers. It took us very little time to realise that we knew nothing.‖

Once the community and the founders joined hands in the learning process, Belaku grew in unprecedented ways. Now, Belaku‘s block-printed scarves and kurtas are worn in France and England; they are unique in design and craft. And its paper pens and innovatively bound and decorated handpaper books and greeting cards are much sought after at sales in urban spaces.

In the villages, Belaku has provided multiple job options to women who had very little choice in their lives. They are gainfully employed as trained teaching help in government-run anganwadis or in Belaku‘s embroidery unit. A few local women are conducting a pregnancy care research project across 60 villages.

Belaku‘s development charter in the region was defined by the community, especially the women. Dr Ganapathy remembers that at the end of workshops on food and care during pregnancy, the women said: ―It‘s all very well to talk about eating right, but who is going to pay for it?

Thus was born Kirana, a micro-business group engaged in the production of recycled paper.

―Friends volunteered to train the women to make paper. What they initially made was like cardboard.

They‘ve worked really hard to reach the quality they have achieved now. They continuously improvise and come up with their own new decoration techniques,‖ says Dr Ganapathy, who is always on the look-out for markets for the products.

―Most of the women are battling odds and coming to work every day,‖ says Dr Ganapathy.

Domestic violence is considered ‗normal‘ in most houses. The women say that the quality of their lives has improved over the years with Belaku.

Next door to the papermakers is the government pre-school, or anganwadi, which is ―brilliant in concept but abysmal in execution,‖ says Dr Ganapathy. A study by Belaku revealed that most of the anganwadis in the region were badly in need of teaching help, and repair. The government-appointed anganwadi workers are trapped in paperwork and a threat-oriented teaching style. Training sessions did not change their teaching methodology. With support from its funders, Belaku trained and appointed ‗gelathies‘ or ‗friends‘ of the anganwadi teachers. These ‗friends‘ support the anganwadi worker with more child-friendly classroom strategies.

Case 5:

107 ANANDI: Helping women set the development agenda

In Saurashtra and the Panchmahals district of Gujarat ANANDI is ensuring that women set the agenda for infrastructure development, food security and much more. Women here have rebuilt 700 quake-damaged homes, and are trained in disaster-proof construction, repair of hand pumps and the digging of wells

To a substantial extent, the credit for this goes to the initiative of five key women with experience in working on development issues in rural areas. Sumitra Thacker, Jahnvi Andharia, Sejal Dand, Nita Hardikar and Preeti Sheth would often run into each other during the course of their work with different NGOs. What drew them together was the conviction that a new approach was necessary to stir change in the rural areas. Their collective restlessness led to the formation, five years ago, of ANANDI (Area Networking and Development Initiatives) which believes that social and economic development can occur only when women play a pivotal role in it.

The Anandi women gave themselves a clear four-point agenda: to set up women's self-help groups, to involve women in the rural development process, to involve women in the planning of rehabilitation work following man-made and natural disasters, and to become a link between different organisations working for women's welfare and health.

And where is Anandi today? Two women's collectives have been set up with as many as 3,000 women members. In Saurashtra, the NGO has developed a network with six local development organisations and have already mobilised over 2,000 women. With Anandi's guidance, women in these regions are now addressing issues related to water, electricity, affordable credit, health, food security, micro-credit and capacity building of women in panchayats (local village councils).

Anandi's groundwork was put to the test when Gujarat was torn apart by the January 2001 earthquake. The NGO selected one of the five most backward blocks of Gujarat: Maliya taluka (block) bordering Saurashtra and Kutch. In Maliya, about 19,000 houses in 47 villages were damaged and 185 people died. With help from Anandi, the women of 10 villages in the taluka began the process of rehabilitation.

The local women built as many as 700 houses themselves; no masons were hired. Anandi trained them in masonry and earthquake-proof housing, and also arranged to pay them for the masonry.

Today, these women are considered experts on disaster-proof housing.

108 With funds from the Prime Minister's Relief Fund, Anandi had four schools reconstructed, while a primary school was established through a donation from a Dehradun-based NGO. And funds collected by children - random small donations from passers-by on the streets of Warangal district in Andhra Pradesh - helped set up an educational centre in Venasar village of Maliya taluka.

Village women have constructed about 100 water tanks and 650 toilet blocks in the Jasdan, Kalyanpur and Gadhada talukas of Saurashtra. They can repair water hand-pumps and dig wells too.

Following the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat riots, Anandi plunged into riot relief work in the worst-affected Panchmahals district, amid a very hostile political environment.

They also gave food and material aid to as many as 10,269 people to help reconstruct destroyed homes.

Understanding the importance of creating livelihood options, Anandi also distributed sewing machines to several Muslim women. The machines have become an integral part of their lives and scores of women in many villages of Panchmahals now have a reason for hope.

The unwritten credo of Anandi clearly is: There is no limit to what can be achieved if one is not concerned about who takes the credit.

Case 6:

Battling chauvinism to do a man's job

Illiterate tribal women in Uttar Pradesh equip themselves with non-conventional skills like repairing handpumps through the intervention of a voluntary group called Vanangana. Founded by Madhavi Kuckreja in 1994, Vanangana, derived from van (forest) and angan (courtyard), seeks to impart non-conventional skills to women, enabling them to manage their daily lives more effectively.

Banda‘s low water table and indifferent irrigation facilities led to a heavy reliance on handpumps, which never seemed to work. Training the women in repair has changed the character of this dry and hard land. ―There was some doubt whether illiterate women could understand the mechanics involved, but they surprised all of us by learning quickly,‖ recalls Ashok Mishra, junior engineer of Jal Nigam, a government agency that trained the women initially.

In the Manickpur block to which the women were first assigned, nearly half the pumps were inoperative. Villages had to wait for days for the two Jal Nigam mechanics who attended to nearly 930 pumps spread over an area of 1,000 sq kms. The newly acquired skills of the women, however, have now ensured that almost 90 per cent of the pumps work all through the summer.

109 The lives of the women have simultaneously changed. Many have chosen this as a profession. While Chamela fought with her mother-in-law to be allowed to do the job, others have battled chauvinism, scorn and apathy to become mechanics themselves.

The achievements of the women mechanics have prompted the Uttar Pradesh (UP) state government to replicate the scheme in other regions too. Vanangana was also chosen by the Uttar Pradesh government as one of the participant NGOs in the World Bank-funded Swajal Project. This rural water supply and environmental sanitation project works in over 1,000 villages in 19 districts of the state.

Case 7:

Swayam is an NGO founded by Anuradha Kapoor. The main task that it undertakes is to rekindle a will in women and help them determine the course of their life. ―Swayam,‖ explains founder Anuradha Kapoor, ―means oneself.‖ The centre offers a range of direct services to the women, addressing their emotional, practical and financial needs.

When a client approaches Swayam, her needs are assessed. These might include counselling for trauma, medical aid, police assistance, legal advice, financial help, help for her children, shelter, etc.

Swayam has a team of volunteers, including counsellors, social workers, lawyers, and a network of doctors.

Opportunities for emotional healing are important and the Swayam Drop-In Centre allows women to meet, share experiences and support each other. Support group activities have resulted in two initiatives. One is a Bengali magazine, Prayas, which deals with the issue of violence. The other is the Swayam theatre group, which regularly organises plays in public parks and streets.

Programmes to sensitise the community to the problems of violence against women are also undertaken. Workshops for the police, judges and lawyers, and the public in general are organised.

Swayam also holds regular campaigns in schools. ―Violence against women is a result of society regarding them as inferior to men,‖ says Kapoor. ―Making children realise the inequities and injustice that characterise gender roles is essential since they are the decision-makers of tomorrow.‖

Case 8:

Empowering peasant women

110 The Centre for Women‘s Development Studies has worked over two decades to train Santhal tribal women in Bankura, West Bengal, in collective and individual livelihood skills.

Peasant women from the Bankura district of West Bengal now have a voice in panchayats (local self-government bodies) and family matters, thanks to a remarkable partnership with academicians from Delhi.

Following a land reform camp organised for landless workers in 1980, Dr Veena Mazumdar of the Delhi-based Centre for Women‘s Development Studies (CWDS) agreed to organise the women of Bankura. Most of the women were Santhal tribals and low-caste Hindus. All of them were landless, while many had been deserted by their husbands and did not even own a homestead plot. Their worst ordeal was seasonal migration to the distant Burdwan or Hoogly where they slogged in the paddy fields for a small income.

Following a land reform camp organised for landless workers in 1980, Dr Veena Mazumdar of the Delhi-based Centre for Women‘s Development Studies (CWDS) agreed to organise the women of Bankura. Most of the women were Santhal tribals and low-caste Hindus. All of them were landless, while many had been deserted by their husbands and did not even own a homestead plot. Their worst ordeal was seasonal migration to the distant Burdwan or Hoogly where they slogged in the paddy fields for a small income.