Fashioning a New Life for India's Women

[Guest guest]

MUMBAI - Stitching up clothes and cooking lunches for office

workers, 200 women in the slums of Bombay have found a glimmer of

independence through a project that offers them incomes and a break

from the cycle of gender and caste discrimination.

 

"In India, women suffer the most. They rely first on their parents

or their brothers and then their husbands," said Sister Isabel, a

Spaniard who launched the Creative Handicraft project in 1984. "When

a couple only has girls as children, it's seen as a catastrophe: The

husband leaves. I wanted to build something for those women."

 

The project, which runs eight cooperatives in the alleys of the

Agashnagar slum, will showcase its work when it sells its food

during the January 16-21 World Social Forum, the annual convention

of anti-globalisation forces.

 

For the first World Social Forum outside Brazil, organisers chose

Bombay, whose high-rises house some of the world's top global firms

but where around half of the 18 million-strong population lives in

poverty.

 

Johny Joseph, secretary general of Creative Handicraft, said the

project began as a way "to offer a salary to women so that they

don't hesitate to send to school their children, who were spending

the day begging."

 

"These are generally women in difficult situations, who are

illiterate and uneducated, or who were beaten by alcoholic

husbands," he said.

 

Lydia Miami, an Asia officer of the Paris-based Catholic Committee

Against Hunger and for Development which supports the project,

stressed a key obstacle was the dowry system which permeates Indian

society.

 

"In India, it's the woman and her family who have to pay dowry, but

they don't always have the means. And that's why they get beaten,"

Miami said on a visit to the site.

 

Sitting on the ground with a dozen other women in brightly coloured

saris, Beula, 22, stitched a pillow cover to be sold through the

project.

 

"My husband's job is unstable. For me it's good to have a permanent

income," she said.

 

The work each month earns her around 1,300 rupees (about US $29), a

significant sum for a woman in a Bombay slum. In addition, she is

granted another 500 rupees ($11 dollars) monthly for each of her

children.

 

"And here I can speak about my problems. The others support me,"

said Beula, whose two children have received nursery care and

schooling arranged by the project.

 

On the roofs of their makeshift homes in the slum lie the fruit of

the women's labours: clothes - some of them modelled on French and

Spanish designs so they can be exported to the two countries, pillow

covers, bags and toys.

 

A few steps higher in the shantytown, other women prepare lunch. The

project - presumably like the customers at the World Social Forum -

does not discriminate against those who belong to Hinduism's lowest

class, the Dalits.

 

To high-caste traditionalists, even the cutlery used by Dalits is

forever impure.

 

"Here no one asks what caste a woman belongs to. We don't pay

attention to it. I think 70 percent of them are Dalits, although

their leader is a Brahmin," Joseph said.

 

Besides the 200 women who work in handicrafts and cooking, another

700 take part in Creative Handicraft's microcredit programs, which

help women plan their budgets. Around 500 women participate in the

child-care and school programs.

 

Sister Isabel said her project has made a mark in the tough

community.

 

"Now some men are afraid of me. They respect me," she said.

 

Source: Independent Online, South Africa

URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?

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