30 Women’s Agenda and NGOs

Sneha Gole

Introduction:

In this chapter we will be looking at the role that NGOs have played in forwarding women’s agenda at the level of government policies and programmes. The focus will be on understanding the functioning of NGOs as different levels, within the international framework including at the United Nations (UN), as collaborators with the State and as advocacy and pressure groups. The contemporary period has been marked as one of change and transformation for social movement sector as a whole. One of important transformations has been the proliferation of NGOs in the social movement field. NGOs is the short-form for Non-Governmental Organizations and is used to denote a wide variety of voluntary organizations, organizations involved in service delivery, advocacy, programmatic interventions etc. Organizations as diverse as Rotary Clubs, associations of professionals like doctors, public service trusts use the moniker NGO to designate themselves. NGOs are not a new phenomenon, with voluntary organizations in general having a much longer history, but scholars note that the period after 1990s has seen a ‘boom’, in terms of the increasing numbers of NGOs and them becoming more influential actors in the sphere of policy formulation, programme implementation etc. Thus, NGOs have emerged as powerful actors within civil society.

In this context, there has also been much debate on what this proliferation means for the question of women’s rights. It has been noted by scholars (Alvarez,1999) that with the ‘boom’ in NGOS, the character of the autonomous women’s groups has undergone major changes. These changes have been manifested in their organizational structure, funding patterns, strategies, programmes and as pointed out by some, even in their aims. It has been contended that they focused on service delivery rather than social transformation and policy assessment rather than policy amendment. Scholars have pointed out that women’s organizations now work as gender experts rather than gendered citizens. They act more as surrogates for civil society rather than as representatives of civil society. (Alvarez 1999) On the other hand, scholars like Moghadam ( Moghadam 1996) have argued that transnational networks are organizing women around the most pressing issues of the day and that they have a broader and more far reaching impact than local movements. This is sharp contrast to the view of scholars like Alvarez who contend that as movements become more transnational, their commitment to grass roots mobilization diminishes. Scholarship has pointed to the necessity of examining the local context of movements in order to understand the apparent contradiction of the above observations. (Basu, 1995)

Scholars have pointed out how the proliferation of NGOs is a wide ranging reorganization of the political field. It has also been pointed out how the matrix of NGO-isation in India is largely non-feminist, as NGOs intersect with the State, donors, market and civil society actors with complex networks and relationships that span these boundaries. (Sangari 2007) Within the Indian context during 2003-04, 14,700 groups were registered with the ministry of home affairs and received foreign funds worth Rs 4,856 crore (Rs 48.56 billion), up from Rs 3,403 crore in 1998-99 and Rs 230 crore in 1986. It is then contended that the proliferation of NGOs be understood as a result of the simultaneous but contradictory processes of relegation and cooption of women’s issues by the State. However debates about funding and autonomous politics have been much older, situated in the cold war era where funding agencies were alleged to be playing a ‘nefarious’ role , especially by the ultra left groups. Scholars point out that growing participation of NGOs in each of the national women’s conferences reflects the fact that the women’s movement is a hugely funded affair today. (Biswas 2006) It is therefore in this context that we are going to examine the role that NGOs have played in furthering women’s agenda at the national and international level.

In the first section we will look at the UN system and the role of NGOs within that, in particular with respect to engendering the discourse and practise of development. In the next section, we will examine the ways in which women’s groups and NGOs have been part of conceptualizing and implementing government programmes and how they have tried to further women’s agenda through that. We shall examine the experience of the Women’s Development Programme (WDP) and Mahila Samakhya for these purposes. In the third section, we will look at NGOs as advocacy and pressure groups and how they have played an important role in formulation of new laws, through the cases of the laws on domestic violence and sexual harassment at workplace.

The UN system and role of NGOs:

The United Nations (UN) which came into being in the context of the destruction and human loss of the Second World War has been an important point of reference for debates surrounding Gender and Development. It becomes important therefore for us to trace the ways in which the UN system has defined the issues of women’s rights and how non-governmental entities have made in-roads and spaces for pushing their agendas within a largely state-centric UN system. Scholars like Jain (2005) have argued that the furthering of women’s agenda within the UN system was shaped through four levels of contestations, coalitions and collaborations: at the national and international levels; within the UN, between ‘malestream’ and ‘women’s sub-stream’; within the ‘women’s stream’- on basis of location and politics and between women’s movements and women inside UN. She argues that we need to conceptualize the journey of issues of gender and development within the UN in the following stages:

Setting the stage for Equality (1945- 1965)

The first stage of engagement between issues of gender and development was inaugurated by the formation of Commission on the Status of Women in 1946. The CSW was mandated to make reports and recommendations about women’s political, social, economic equality, civil and educational rights. There was much debate within the UN over the need for a separate commission. In this stage, the cause of women found home within the rubric of Human Rights. The women’s sub-stream argued that rights are indivisible, they did not accept or apply division of human rights into civil and political on the one hand and economic, social and cultural on the other. They argued that women’s issues concern all and accountability must be built into all parts of the system. Thus, in this early phase, we see that the right to equality was conceptualized in a way to emphasize equality of rights of men and women in terms of equal access to resources, as well as other rights like universal suffrage for women. This period was marked by two trends: agencies worked together on women’s issues collaborating on issue-based themes as well as the creation of women-only mechanisms. Third world women’s voices which were becoming increasingly visible in this period, underlined their issues like invisibility of their work as well as grappling with custom. These voices also extended the concept of equality beyond legal equality to equal participation in nation-building, social and economic development, civic responsibilities and overall improvement in status of women. Thus, the issue of equality for women was increasingly transposed into debates on development.

The strategies of working included coalitions of women on the “inside” and those on the “outside”, using informal methods to supplement formal ones. Jain (2005) points out that this constituted a triangular alliance of women delegates in the UN bodies, women working in the secretariat (or the UN bureaucracy) and women working outside UN. With respect to NGOs, this was an important phase because they were accorded a consultative status within the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

Women working within NGOs and within the UN started pointing out to the gender issues within development. They argued that the UN approach to development was based on stereotypical notions of femininity and issues affecting women from North as well as the perception of funding agencies. For instance they pointed out how the community development programme launched in India with USAID support was based on a gendered schema which assumed that it was men who were involved in agriculture and not women. Therefore the programme provided agricultural knowledge for men and home science for women. Feminists pointed out how this amounted to an exporting of the US program with implicit assumptions about race, class, gender etc. Thus, the efforts were geared towards dismantling the stereotypes and assumptions of development thinking and practise.

Inscribing Development into Rights (1966-1975)

The second phase was marked by efforts to integrate women in the total development effort, the issue and perspective of Women in Development (WID) propelled to the world stage. This was also a time marked by the building of an institutional architecture for pushing gender equality. In 1967, the Declaration for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (DEDAW) was promulgated, which was the first comprehensive legal measure on women’s rights. This signalled the acceptance on the part of the UN to deal with phenomenon of discrimination from women’s perspective. The DEDAW looked at legal and extra-legal barriers to equality and opened up the private sphere to scrutiny.

This was a period of learning to integrate women into development, questioning paradigms by drawing from empirical research, especially country based research on women as workers. This led to an integration of women in overall policy formulation including programs to create jobs, provide education and vocational training. The CSW also included women’s economic contributions in its conceptualization of equality which marked a clear departure from modernization theories which were dominant at this point in time. The period therefore saw the beginning of funding for programs for women/ programming for women as focus as well as projects targeted at women. Through efforts of women’s NGOs, this period saw the rise of the “Equity” approach which women should be given equality with men, same privileges and rights.

In terms of expanding women’s rights, this was an important period, with the first World Conference on Women held in Mexico City in 1975. This marked the growing visibility of women’s issues within UN and international women’s movement and was the first such conference dedicated entirely to women’s issues at the level of the UN. As is well-known this conference and the preparations for it had a cascading effect on knowledge production about women’s status at the national level. In India, for instance, the government in preparation of this conference, commissioned a status of women in India report. This document which was published as the ‘Towards Equality’ Report underlined that the status of women in India had not only not improved after independence but that it had deteriorated on most indicators, with the possible exception of spread of education among urban women. This report implicated the Indian post-colonial state for its failure to deliver the basic rights to its women and was in many ways the impetus for a new focus on women’s issues and the inauguration of ‘women’ as a subject of knowledge production. It led to the formation of Women’s Studies Centres and institutionalization of the agenda of knowledge production about, for and of women. The report was also significant because it helped challenge the assumptions about development. The politics of the formation of the category ‘woman’ and how the report was ‘allowed’ by the Indian state which in that very year was clamping down on democratic rights and civil liberties, any form of political opposition and dissent through the proclamation of emergency, points out to the ways in which ‘women’ were seen as an apolitical, safe category of state benevolence. However, it is important to note that women’s groups were able to successfully push for the inclusion of women’s agenda at the level of the UN.

The inclusion of a NGO forum in the Mexico Conference was another defining moment. It included not just established NGOs with consultative status but also smaller, newer groups. This led to the beginning of a new kind of networking, using the site of the UN for greater synergy, enhancing the ability to respond quickly. The World Plan of Action which came up as a result of the conference points to the new perspective which informed the relationship between women and development, women were seen not merely as recipients of welfare but as contributors to development and peace. The declaration coming out of Mexico also stands testament to the politics around women and development, there is no consensus in the declaration, with three themes drawn from women from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd worlds respectively – equality, development and peace. Numerous NGOs, informal groups, networks and national and international programmes spawned out of the International Women’s Year (declared by the UN in 1975) and the subsequent decade was a jumping board for a new phase of UN’s partnership with the constituency called women.

Questioning Development Paradigms (1976-1985)

In the context of the New economic order, development came to be redefined as equity along with well-being. The focus was on fulfilment of material and social requirements of daily needs, what have been seen as the Basic Needs and Anti-poverty approaches. On the other hand, this context was also marked by a resurgence of neo-liberal theories and structural adjustment. This period saw a continuation of the redefinition of equality for women in terms of embedding development in rights. 1975-85 which was designated as the decade of women, also saw an explosion of knowledge which focussed on the inequalities between men and women. A lot of work was done by activists and researchers in the area of women’s work, pointing out flaws in tools for measurement of work which invisibilized women’s work, measurement of unpaid work, time use surveys, focus on poor women and women in the labour force. All this highlighted that in face women were deeply embedded in economy but were unrecognized.

In the Copenhagen conference that followed Mexico, harmful effects of globalization on women’s bodies and economies and issues like Palestine and apartheid were fore-grounded and links between peace and development came to be recognized. This led to the Declaration on Participation of Women in Promoting International Peace and Cooperation.

Another important outcome of this time period was the coming up of new networks like DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New era) which came up as part of preparations for the Nairobi Conference of 1985. It was one of the first networks coming up from the South. They argued that planning needs to focus on the needs of the poor and that poor women’s work should be central to development planning. The other focus of DAWN was to build south-south reflections on development. It is a network of scholars and activists which continues to do research and advocacy, both within the UN system and also in different nations from where it draws its membership.

Development as if Women Mattered (1986-1995)

The decade between 1986 and 1995 has been a decade of contradictions: on the one hand, it saw the increased dominance of free market policies and liberalization, what has been referred to as the Reagan and Thatcher era. This meant an impetus to structural adjustment policies (SAP) meaning lesser government spending and developmental loans with conditionalities of implementing SAP. The end of the cold war also meant increasing role of Bretton Woods Institutions and decreasing role of UN and its agencies in negotiating economic justice. On the other hand, this is also the period in which alternative measures of progress like the HDR emerge and the informal sector moves to become vital sector of the economy. Scholars like Jain (2005) argue that this period also saw the mobilization of women to influence policy and emergence of women as leaders as well as the increasing importance of women’s NGOs in UN Conferences. This was also a contradiction in terms, as women activists, academics and policymakers worked to increase knowledge and change policy within UN and at home, the quest for equality was proceeding at a slow pace and female poverty was increasing.

The Human Development Report 1995 brought out by the UNDP was important in terms of the success of women’s groups and NGOs in pushing the feminist agenda. The report introduced two new indicators, namely Gender Development Index (GDI) and Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GDI took on from the HDI, but adjusted it in accordance with the gender inequality prevalent, whereas the GEM looked at women’s participation in the economic and political spheres.

The contours of the global economy were also rapidly changing in this period, with the informal economy taking centre stage. The policies of liberalization, privatization and globalization produced a scenario wherein women located in the third world came to be preferred as workers. The NGOs reacted to these changes by producing more knowledge about the women workers in the informal sector. This new knowledge and consistent advocacy efforts led to the visiblization of domestic work and changes in the accounting systems for national accounts. For the first time, unpaid domestic work was counted and a new category called Extended-SNA which was productive work which remained unpaid since it was done at home, or within relationships of blood or marriage was added to the system of national accounts to measure and count the invisible, unpaid work that women do within the household. Efforts were also made the level of the ILO to claim social security for workers in informal sectors.

Another major arena in which feminist concerns were pushed successfully was the issue of violence against women. From the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights that gave the slogan ‘Women’s rights are human rights’ to the appointing of two special rapporteurs – one on sexual violence during war and one on violence against women, NGOs were able to push for a recognition of violence as a major international concern. In the run-up to the Vienna conference, women’s groups across the world networked to push women’s rights. They organized speak-out sessions for women survivors of violence and used advocacy strategies to push for women’s rights to be the platform for the conference as a whole. This has led to a greater awareness about the gendered nature of conflict, as was seen in the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia and on Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR respectively).

Thus, as far as NGOs were concerned this period meant an expansion in the ways of engagement, including conferences, networks, caucuses. Many newer networks emerged in this period and networking emerged as a conscious form of organizing, with a sharper focus on differences among women based on race, class, caste, location and priorities.

Contemporary period (1996 onwards)

The contemporary period has seen larger debates on the role of the UN, the harsh impact of SAPs, convergence of militarization, globalization and conservatism and the limited nature of UN’s response to growing crisis. Women within the UN continue to be excluded from corridors of power and are struggling to move into decision making roles. Though the rhetoric is of mainstreaming, women and women’s issues have continued to remain in a ghetto. The policy successes in this phase have been largely on the front of women and conflict with women’s groups managing to push for the Security Council to adopt Resolution 1325 which recognizes sexual violence against women as a war crime.

NGOs have made use of strategies like shadow and alternate reports to underline the non-compliance and non-implementation of obligations by nation-states who have been signatories of the various UN conventions. The idea is to ‘name and shame’, in order to push nation-states to undertake necessary steps for promotion and fulfillment of women’s rights.

Thus, we see through this overview that advocacy and mobilization by women’s NGOs and other networks has brought visibility to gender but complex issues persist.

NGOs as facilitators of government programmes

An important way in which NGOs have been involved in pushing for women’s agenda has been through implementing and facilitating government programmes which aim to fulfil either women’s practical, everyday interests or their strategic, long-term interests. One of the major roles of NGOs in this regard has been to push for meeting more strategic interests even in programmes which have very limited aims. We will try to understand the possibilities and limitations of NGOs working in tandem with government programmes through the case of Mahila Samakhya programme.

Mahila Samakhya has figured prominently in discussions around women and empowerment, the relationship between women’s movement and the state as well as to understand the possibilities and limitations of government- civil society partnerships, of which the MS is an important and prominent example. It is undertaken by the state and feminist groups in partnership with each other and is structured as a hybrid “government-organized non- governmental organization” with its aims to collectively empower and mobilize lower-caste, rural Indian women.

The MS programme was born in the context of the wide-spread political unrest in the country, through the 1970s and 80s. It was designed as an programme for education and empowerment of women, following the New Education Policy of 1986. The major aim of the programme was to achieve women’s empowerment through education. It was based on the highly successful Women’s Development Programme (WDP) of the government of Rajasthan. The programme worked by training women from various villages to become village-level activists. These women were then trained to organize other women from the village into groups. The nature of activities taken up by the programme in each village varied according to the needs and aspirations of the local women but education remained at the core of the programme. Feminists have consistently intervened in the MS programme to ensure that the vision of empowerment remains political.

Scholars like Sharma (2010) draw our attention to the fact that the launch of the MS program coincided with the liberalization of the Indian economy. She argues that while the temporal conjecture between the implementation of liberalization policies and the MS programme, does not in itself make MS a neoliberal programme, however, it does raise the question of how certain development initiatives in India articulate with neoliberal principles.

The relationship between the women’s movement and the state as always been two-way. Formal policies and programmes have attempted to project the postcolonial state as the primary agent of development and change (Gupta and Sharma 2006; Ray and Katzenstein 2005) and as the protector and promoter of the well-being of the marginalized, including women. The women’s movement, along with many other social movements and organizations has demanded affirmative action from the state and sought protection of the interests of the marginalized. They have done so expecting that he state may and ought to possess the resources and opportunities required for bringing about change that they might not be in a position to do (Agnihotri and Parliwala 2001). This has been starkly visible in the use of legal amendments as a major strategy by the women’s movement, as also the attendant critiques of the ‘statism’ of the movement (Agnes 1994).

However scholars point out that the 1990s presents a new turn with respect to this expectation, owing to the changing character of the state in this period, primarily the state moving away from its initially socialist outlook (Ramachandran and Jandhalya 2012). They argue that the Indian state increasingly believes that it has no choice but to liberalise finance and privatize the economy, accompanied by a promotion of NGOs to do work that the state is unable to or unwilling to do. They also point out to the changing political landscape of the country, where with constitutional amendments institutions of local self government have been revived and women’s participation promoted, in the name of decentralization and enabling people’s ownership of local governance and development process. It has been pointed out that paying attention to the specificities of the Indian case, allow us to question the generic descriptions of neoliberalism as “dewelfarization” or “roll back”, since it points to the troubled travels and contradictory effects of neoliberal ideologies (Sharma, 2010). The Mahila Samakhya programme has been studied as a site through which the articulated nature of neoliberalism and its ambiguous, uneven effects can be demonstrated. In this formulation it has been asserted that MS cannot be seen as a typical neoliberal programme, rather it is an overdetermined product of multiple forces and ideologies not limited to neoliberalism. An initiative focussed on collective empowerment, it borrows from diverse frameworks, yet operates in a context where the empowerment of individuals and communities is widely promoted as a mainstream technology of neoliberal development and governance. Thus, the programme with its contingent and curious ideological confluences, appropriations and disarticulations, upsets any preconceived notions about what empowerment may mean or what its outcomes may be (Sharma, 2010:189). Thus, in terms of the women’s movements engagement with the state, the crucial question in the context of neoliberal globalization is not whether they should engage with the State, but how.

However, it would be important for us to note here that this entry will have to be examined carefully, for as studies indicate women tend to identify their public roles within the ambit of (feminized and politically passive) ‘social service’ (Ghosh and Lama-Rewal 2005; Strulik 2008). As pointed out in the context of Kerala, there is a marked difference between the realm of ‘high politics’ and ‘local governance’, in terms of degree of activity and autonomy, modes of rule and relation of each domain to capital (Devika and Thampi 2012). The domain of ‘local governance’ where women are located is in this classification seen as governing-by-rule-and-procedure, with a greater concession to consensus-building. Thus, scholars have argued that in many ways this meant that the intense feminist challenges to the distinction between politics and development/ between public and private was ignored, even as the question of women’s access to public was partially adapted, instrumentalized to community well-being and local development. In a sense, what can be argued is that women’s entry into the ‘political’ sphere occurs at a time, when that sphere is undergoing intense modifications, keeping this empowerment within the realm of the ‘social’ and did not really open up the political for women.

However, other studies of the MS programme from other contexts point out to the possibilities therein. Narayanan’s (2002) study in rural Karnataka shows that poor rural women supported by a solidarity network of sangha can begin to challenge discrimination based on gender, caste and class. It confirms that an on-going ‘empowerment’ programme can create an enabling environment for poor women elected to panchayats. In Uttar Pradesh, through consistent efforts by women’s groups, the MS experience has been translated into the production of the Khabar Lehariya, India’s first newspaper run entirely by rural, Dalit women. The newspaper has not only meant transformation in the lives of the women who run it, but has also interrogated the nexus between knowledge and power in significant ways.

Thus, we see through this discussion to what extent it is possible for NGOs to push for women’s agenda and gender equality through facilitating and implementing government programmes. Given the complex nature of the state in neoliberal times, this has not been an easy task. The rhetoric of empowerment has opened up spaces for feminist engagement, but its limited framework has often meant that while ‘women’ as a category are foregrounded, critical gender analysis is often missing. Therefore the process of pushing for women’s agenda has often been a contradictory one.

NGOs as advocacy and pressure groups

Non-governmental organizations have played an extremely important role in pushing for changes in law and policies acting as advocacy and pressure groups. They undertake studies of existing laws and policies, pointing out lacunae and engaging with the state to bring about changes in policies and laws. A good example of this would be the law around domestic violence and the campaign by women’s NGOs for the same.

The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (henceforth DV act) came into existence in 2005. It is an important piece of legislation because it makes domestic violence a legally recognized category while also providing for a series of civil remedies to the survivor of domestic violence. As pointed out by Jaising (2009) it is also significant for its application of the principles of constitutional law to the realm of the ‘private’/domestic, long resisted. The law came about, as a result of a sustained campaign for over a decade, but also has its roots in a longer engagement by the women’s movement around the question of violence against women. In the 1970s, the women’s movement first brought out the question of violence within the domestic/ intimate realm, through a focus initially on what came to be called ‘dowry deaths’. The movement underlined that violence within the private/intimate space cannot be seen as personal tragedy and had to be seen as a political issue, part of a larger structure of unequal gender relationships. It was through this campaign that two important amendments 304B (dealing with dowry murders) and 498A (which addressed cruelty to the wife by husband/ relatives) were introduced in the Indian Penal Code. Under 498A cruelty was made a cognizable, non-bailable offence. However, once the cases came to court, it became clear that there were several problems with the section. On the one hand, it focussed on married women, leaving a range of violences faced by unmarried/ old women within the home invisible, secondly, the definition of cruelty was such that it left out a spectrum of everyday, sexual, emotional violence out of the ambit of law. The law only recognized cruelty when the woman could prove that she had been forced to contemplate suicide or hurting herself. This made the law rather limited in terms of its application.

The movement also realized that criminal law was severely limited in terms of addressing the survivors’ needs of shelter, livelihood etc. It criminalized the individual man, but also rendered the State largely unaccountable for the violence faced by its women citizens (Jaising 2009). The existing civil remedies were often ineffective or not comprehensive enough for use in case of domestic violence. It was all these considerations that led to the realization that there was a need for a new comprehensive law on domestic violence, which would address these lacunae and provide for effective civil remedies for the survivor. Thus began a long campaign for the DV act, led by Lawyers Collective among others. The organization was asked to prepare a draft by the National Commission of Women and the draft went through many changes and modifications, in conversation with different stakeholders including the state, before it was tabled in the legislature. The bill sought to widen the definition of domestic violence to cover the entire spectrum of violence faced by women within the private/domestic sphere, it sought to redefine the domestic relationship as going beyond the marital to include even marriage-like arrangements and adoption, thus bringing a range of violence women faced within the realm of the private under the ambit of law. It also sought to give the women right to residence in the shared home, even though the property might not be in her name. The bill also made provisions for appointment of protection officers solely appointed for the implementation of the act and provided a range of civil remedies and injunctions to the survivor. There were many debates around the bill, especially on the issue of whether it should be made gender-neutral and whether women can be made respondents. NGOs like the Lawyers Collective kept working on advocacy efforts, including submissions to the joint parliamentary committee and other fora to push for the bill and it was finally passed in 2006.

NGOs have been working even after the enactment of the bill into law to monitor the implementation, pushing for appointment of protection officers, and coming up with monitoring and evaluation reports to push for better and more effective implementation. Studies indicate that while the DV act has the potential to be extremely useful, its effectiveness for survivors of violence is constrained by the patriarchal frameworks through which courts and other law enforcement agencies operate, where the family is seen as a unit worthy of being maintained and preserved at all costs. The ability of NGOs to push for a feminist agenda within institutional settings faces this major hurdle.

Conclusion

Thus, we see that NGOs have been important actors in pushing for women’s agenda at both the national and international levels. They have done this through working as advocacy and pressure groups as well as getting involved in the implementation and service delivery. However, this is not an unmitigated success story. The ability of NGOs to push forward a progressive agenda is shaped and structured through the institutional architecture as well as larger structures of the market and the state. It has been in the realm of violence against women that NGOs have had the most success

References:

• Agarwal, B (1989): ‘Rural Women, Poverty and natural resources: Sustenance, Sustainability and Struggle for Change’. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol 24, No 3, WS 46-WS112.
• _______ (1995): A field of One’s Own: Gender and Land rights in South Asia’. Cambridge
• University Press: Cambridge
• ________ (1999): Social Security and Farming: Coping with Seasonality and Calamity in Rural India in E. Ahmed, J Dreze, J Hills and A Sen (eds): Social Security in Developing Countries.
• Oxford University Press: New Delhi.
• _________ (2003): “Gender and land Rights: Revisited: Exploring New Prospects via the State, Family and Market’, in S Razavi (ed), Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp 184-224.
• Badn, S and Milward, K (1995): Gender and Poverty. BRIDGE Report Commissioned by Sida.
• Institute of Development Studies. Brighton.
• Darooka, P (2008): Social Security: A Women’s Human Rights Discussion Paper, No 2. PWECSR.
• New Delhi.
• Discussion Paper (2011): Locating Women’s Livelihood in the Human Right Framework. PWESCR No 3, July 2011. New Delhi. pp 1-12.
• Jha, D (2003): Policy Drift in Agriculture. Economic and Political Weekly Vol 38, No 47 (Nov 22-28) pp 4941-4948.
• Jodhka, S (2006): Beyond ‘Crises’: Rethinking Contemporary Punjab Agriculture. Economic and Political Weekly Vol 41, No 16 (Apr 22-28), pp 1530-1537.
• Kannan, K P (2010): ‘Social Security for the Working Poor in India: Two National Initiatives’, Development. 53; 338-42.
• Krishna, S (2003): Light Shines through Gossamer Theads. Inside- Outsside Political Spaces. Vol 38, No 17, pp 1691-1696.
• _________ (2005): Gendered Price of Rice in North- Eastern India. Vol 40, No 25, pp 2555-2562.
• _________ (2007): Women’s Livelihood Rights: Recasting Citizenship for Development. SSage Publication. New Delhi.
• _________ (2009): Genderscapes: Revisioning Natural Resource Management. Zubaan: New Delhi.

•     _________ (2010): ‘Gender Equity in National Rural Mission: Institutions and Collective Actions:
• paper presented at Two decades of Impact and Learning. Regional Conference: Orissa Watershed Development Mission. DFID and N R Int. U K). New Delhi 21-23. April 2010. Hirway, I (2002): Employment and unemployment situation in the 1990s – How good is the NSS data? Economic and Political Weekly Vol 37, No 21, pp 2027-2036.
• _________ (2012): Gender and Sustainable Livelihoods; ‘Sidestream’/’Mainstream’ in W.
• Harcourt (ed), Women Reclaiming Sustainable Livelihoods. Plagrave: Macmillan
• Krishnaraj M and Shah, A (2004): Women in Agriculture. Academic Foundation: New Delhi.
• Krishnaraj, M (2005a): Food Security: How and For Whom? Economic and Political Weekly Vol 40, No 25 (June 18), pp 2508-2512.
• ________ (2005b): Displaced from Land: Case of Santhal Praganas. Economic and Political Weekly Vol 40, No 41 (Oct 8-14), pp 4439-4442.
• _________ (2006); Food Security, Agrarian Crisis and Rural Livelihoods: Implications for Women. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 41, No 52- (Dec 30- 2006 – Jan 5 2007), pp 5376-5388.
• Masika, R and S Joekes (1996): Employment and Sustainable Livelihoods: A Gender Perspective Commissioned by SIDA. Report No 37. Institute of Development Studies, Brighton.
• Mishra, S (2007): Risks, Farmers Suicides and Agrarian Crisis in India. Is there a way Out?
• Working Paper – 2007-014, IGDIR: Mumbai.
• Padhi, R (2009): Women Surviving Framer Suicides in Punjab. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol 44, No 19 (May 9 -15), pp 53-59 Patnaik, U and Patnaik, P (2001): The State, Poverty and Development in India in Nirija Gopal
• Rao, N (2005a): Women’s Rights to Land and Assets: Experiencing of Mainstreaming Gender in Development Programmes. Economic and Political Weekly Vol XL, No 44-45, Oct 29, pp- 4701-4708.
• Sainath, P (2007): The Decade of our Discontent. The Hindu. August 9th, 2007.
• ________ (2011): Census Findings Point to a Decade of Rural Distress’. The Hindu 27th September 2011.
• Sayeed, H and Tzannatos, Z (1995): Sex Segregation in the Labour Force’. World Bank.
• Sen, G (1999): Gender Mainstreaming in Finance: A Reference Manual for Government and Other Stakeholders. Commonwealth Secretariat. 1999. London.
•  Standing, G (1989): ‘Global Feminism through Flexible Labour’, World Development. Vol 17, No 7.
•  Sticher, S and Parpart, J (eds) (1990): Women, Employment and the Family in International Division of Labour. London: Macmillan.
• Sydenham, E (2009): Women and the Right to Livelihoods. World Social Forum 2009. PWESCR.
• Tzannatos, Z (1995): ‘Women’s Labour Hours’. World Bank: Washington D C.
• Vasavi, A.R (1994): ‘Hybrid Times, Hybrid People’: Culture and Agriculture in South India. Man.New Series, Vol 29, No 2 (Jun 1994). Pp 283-300.
• _________ (1999): ‘Agrarian Distress: Market, State and Suicides’. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol 34(32), April 7th, pp 2263-68.
• Vepa, S (2009): Bearing the Brunt: Impact of Rural Distress on Women. Sage Publications: New Delhi