“Women are the world's breadwinners and directly influence the family's nutrition.”
In developing countries, fetching water is the job of women and girl children. Walking for hours, they carry home as much as sixty litres of water daily for their families. …. On average, a rural woman walks several thousand miles yearly to fetch water, more so in arid lands worldwide. Their urban sisters are slightly better off; they may not walk such distances, but they stand in long queues for hours to collect water from roadside taps or water Tanks. Women are the world's water carriers.
Women and Nutrition:
Women are the world's breadwinners and directly influence the family's nutrition. Water and food go together. Women also produce more than half the world's total food supply. Regrettably, most Indians are eating less today than a decade ago; the per capita daily availability of food has declined from 485 to 419 grams daily. One million children die every year of lack of food. People experiencing poverty are worse off because their food and livelihoods have been destroyed. Since the 1970s, The chemical mono-culture of food crops, neglect of cereals and bio-diversity and use of water-guzzling hybrids have eroded the productivity of soils. Moreover, it has led to water mining instead of harvesting, eroding the water resources of vast regions and impoverishing farmer communities. The shocking scale of farmer suicides since the 1990s is the direct consequence of these policies and practices.
The non-poor classes are also worse off because the Corporate food giants have imposed, through clever media blitz, for their obscene profits the harmful junk food and processed foods. So, on the one hand, the poor face malnutrition because of deprivation, while malnutrition in the non-poor classes is linked to a junk-food diet and its equally debilitating health effects.
In rural areas, chronic health problems result from women's role as water carriers and breadwinners. When such is the expenditure of energy and time, there is no room left for education and, by extension, development and economic independence. Moreover, while women carry water and work for food on land, they need to play a more prominent role in water and land policies and have the right to mitigate their problems in accessing inputs, technology, and finance. It has to change.
"There is no change for the welfare of the world unless the condition of the women is improved. It is not possible for a bird to fly with one wing." -- Shrii P R Sarkar
Women and Education:
Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar says: "Even today, women are slaves to the male-dominated social order. It is not only wrong but deplorable. We should decry such domination of women and their psycho-economic exploitation through the evil design of dogmas. To abolish dogma and liberate women from psychic exploitation, there should be:
1. Free education for all women in all countries of the world.
2. No discrimination in the social, educational and religious realms.
3. The provision of economic and social security to all women."
Women and Micro-finance:
Micro-finance Institutions have targeted women in the last more than one and a half decades, originating among poor women in Bangladesh and now a global phenomenon, and attribute their success to the following socio-economic and bio-psychological features.
- Women Are the Poorest of the Poor.
- Women have a higher unemployment rate than men in virtually every country.
- Women also comprise most of the economies' lower-paid, unorganized informal sector.
- It gives priority to increasing women's access to financial services because women are relatively more disadvantaged than men.
- Income-generating activities and Microfinance Institutions can significantly reduce women's vulnerability to poverty.
- Allows the women to become more assertive in household and community affairs.
- Women spend more of their income on their households; thus, when women are helped to increase revenues serves the whole family's welfare.
- Women's success benefits more than one person.
Thus, women's rights are human rights; by extension, women's empowerment is human empowerment.
Cooperative Banks:
Centralized commercial banks serve as instruments to transfer resources and assets to the wheeler-dealers across regions and countries. We should educate people that promotion and investments in local Cooperative banks, mandated to serve the local people, would ensure local employment and purchasing power, strengthen the local economy, and avoid labour migration and human misery. We should establish Cooperative Banks to ensure that the local resources and assets serve local communities.
Women and People Economy:
We can solve the issues highlighted in the preceding by securing minimum essential needs of goods and services to all, as mandated in the Sutra' ‘yugasya Sarva nimna prayojanam savesham vidheyam'. (Basic minimum necessities to all must be Guaranteed).
Women-Lead Cooperatives:
Communities should strive to promote Producer, Consumer or producer-cum-consumer Cooperatives for gainful employment and purchasing power to secure Food, Fiber, Housing, Healthcare, Education and Energy. Women can play a significant role in fulfilling the objectives of People economy, especially in rural areas, through robust participation in all types of Cooperatives.
Food and Nutrition:
Rural Cooperatives of Producers in rural and urban Consumer Cooperatives will secure a fair deal for all.
The critical IrrigationWater resource for agriculture should be treated as a Community Asset for sustainable utilization managed Cooperatively by the stakeholders' Agency. The use of technology for sustainable collection-distribution of surface and underground water with bi-directional excess-deficit net-metering, thus, remunerating-charging, water-source owners-users.
Production for Consumption' should be adopted to secure food security for all.
Village Cooperative Community Kitchen:
Each Samaj should aim at food self-sufficiency to secure Food sovereignty. As a part of that, Cooperative Community Kitchen in every village with modern infrastructure will go a long way in addressing the endemic malnutrition of the local community's poor old and young members.
Fiber and Clothing:
Women, they say, take an interest in clothing. Weaving, Designing, and Tailoring Cooperatives can cater to the demands while generating substantial employment opportunities.
Sweet Home:
Housing architecture should suit local climatic conditions, and drawing on abundantly available and locally available Construction materials should be preferred. We should promote the Producers and Cooperatives of local Construction materials for affordable, decent houses, as the productivity and well-being of all family members depend on living conditions.
We should explore Laurie Baker's inexpensive and eco-friendly housing concepts.
HealthCare:
Ninety percent of the illnesses are traceable to contaminated drinking water. Water should be treated as a community's asset. Community Cooperatives should optimally manage rain and sub-surface water collection, storage (ponds) and distribution for domestic (purified) and crop irrigation consumption.
Access to free Health care for all, of an equal standard, is part of the People economy. Instead of Corporate hospitals, Doctors from various Schools of medicine can come together to start Doctor's Cooperative hospitals.
Neo-Humanist Education:
One's Mother tongue should be the medium of instruction in schools. Equally, imparting higher education in the world language, English, is essential. Further, we should also provide the opportunity to learn any Classical Language to enrich their understanding of human cultural heritage. 'Sa vidya ya vimuktaye' - that is knowledge which liberates.
The Community should organise and fund access to free standard education for all as a part of People Economy.
The commercialization of education is making Education unaffordable. However, women can be given training in teaching and management of educational schools to address the issue. Thus, Trained local teams can join to start pre-primary and primary Teachers' Cooperative Schools.
Cooperation - Sweetest of Human Relationships:
Under People's economy, Women's rural groups in the cooperative model will have opportunities in the Food, Fiber, Health, Housing, Education and Energy sectors for sustainable economic activity for balanced growth and holistic development.
"We stand to create a powerful dynamic and up surging social consciousness, especially among women, so that they are inspired to rise, abolish dogma and annihilate all symbols of slavery, and usher in a new era of coordinated cooperation and glorious achievement."
-- Shrii P R Sarkar
The need of the hour is training 'mentors' for Cooperatives to educate women in the art and science of launching producer-cum consumer cooperatives in each village and community to beat poverty and secure balanced growth of the individual, family and community. And before that, we must create a Cooperative Training Centres Network.
================================
G Surender Reddy
0 Comments