By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Sep 13 2000 (IPS)

Though leading several of India’s notable social and economic rights movements, women continue to be denied due recognition, complained some of these women leaders at a meeting here.

They said that women in India continued to be victims of the same mindset, which once sustained ‘apartheid’ in South Africa.

Speakers at the session on rights and development, organised Tuesday by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and India’s National Human Rights Commission, cited several examples where women have shown the way out of poverty, ignorance and social exploitation.

“A concerted effort is needed to recognise these broad-based movements and recognise them as rivulets that are flowing across India as human rights movements,” said Devaki Jain.

Jain is herself a well-known Indian woman leader, who heads the non-governmental organisation (NGO), ‘Singamma Sreenivasan Foundation’ based in the southern metropolis of Bangalore.

Examples cited at the meeting, included Aruna Roy, who has won this year’s Ramon Magsaysay award, also known as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.

Roy has been honoured for her leadership of a popular movement demanding the right to official information for villagers in western Rajasthan state, which has one of the highest female illiteracy and poverty levels in India.

The UNDP session also took note of the contribution of Medha Patkar, who has led a popular movement against big dams in the central Indian Narmada Valley for over a decade.

Also praised was Vandana Shiva, who champions the right of traditional farmers to seed, threatened by the forces of economic globalisation.

According to Jain, women in India are victims of the kind of ‘racist’ mindset, which led to apartheid in Africa. There was need for “another version of Nelson Mandela’s ‘Long March to Freedom’, which is focussed, strategic and political in its intent,” she said.

As an example, Jain referred to the Indian government’s decision to carve out the new federal province of Uttaranchal from the country’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh.

The new state will be made up of the hill districts of Uttar Pradesh, which are located in the Himalayan foothills. A decades-old demand in the region, this was transformed into a popular movement six years ago.

The mass movement for the new hill province was largely led by women of the area. “But it is men who are now jockeying around for the (state) chief minister’s job,” Jain said.

Women leaders have dramatically transformed the lives of the poorest in the country, the meeting was told. One of the best examples is the famous Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), based in the textile city of Ahmedabad in western coastal Gujarat state.

Mirai Chatterjee of SEWA told how the organisation was started when women pavement vendors decided to stand up to daily harassment by the local police three decades ago.

Tiring of daily beatings and confiscation of their goods, the women petitioned the country’s apex court, which upheld their right to sell goods on the pavement.

“Human rights and human development necessarily go hand-in- hand and SEWA’s experience points to the need for an integrated approach and joint strategy incorporating both the struggle for rights and development,” said Chatterjee.

B.K. Chaturvedi, a top Indian government official, who heads the Department of Women and Child Development, admitted there was need for a movement in favour of women’s equality in economic, social and political matters.

“There is a strong continuing bias against female children in large parts of India, reflected in an adverse sex ratio, especially in central Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where some areas show only 500 girls to every thousand males,” Chaturvedi said.

In some villages in Rajasthan, the sex ratio is just 245 girls for every 1,000 boys among children less then six years old. This is the result of a deeply rooted social bias against girls, which leads to practices such as killing of girl infants and foeticide, he said.

He also quoted statistics, which show that 40 percent of women in India are still married off before the age of 18, despite the existence of laws prohibiting marriage before that age.

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