Sujata Khandekar, Founder of CORO, Accepts The Anita Parekh Award For Women’s Empowerment To CORO
Since this is a women’s empowerment award, I want to share the perspective and approach towards women’s empowerment. Towards that, I would like to share photos of some of my friends and colleagues. They are grassroot leaders who are either working on women empowerment, issues of social justice or marginalised communities.
CORO has a grassroot leadership programme and they are Fellows from this programme. Our first Fellow is Anjum Sheikh who couldn’t complete her education; she was married at 15, had four-year-old son and was deserted. She had no marital or natal support and was struggling to make her livelihood. Then she came in contact with CORO through self-help groups. This is Anjum interacting with women when she was working in our Fellowship and she worked in the Right to Pee campaign that CORO facilitated. Anjum Shaikh was a finalist in the Women Exemplar Award 2020 of the CII foundation. So, that is how she started.
Next, is Mumtaz, my colleague who came to CORO in 2000 with her issue of marital violence. After that was resolved she started working with CORO and in 2015 she was in BBC’s list of 100 most influential women working on violence against women and Right to Pee.
Dwarka is a Fellow from the Pardhi community. This community was notified as a criminal tribe in the British era. It was de-notified after Independence but the stigma still remains. Dwarka has studied till Class 7. She became our Fellow in 2011. She works for the Pardhi community who lack in identity related proofs. She has worked on that and on their education and she is mentor to other members of her community. The Fellowship programme demands that she works in her own community. This is her sitting in the Collector’s meeting, right next to the Collector, deliberating the Pardhi development plan in Maharashtra’s Nagar district.
Ganga Jawarkar comes from the Korku family which is again a primitive tribe. She was our Fellow in 2009-10 and she was the only person who had passed Class 12 in the Korku community. Ganga oozes confidence and was elected Sarpanch not once but twice and in 2018, Lokmat awarded her the best Sarpanch in Maharashtra.
In 2014-15, primary teacher Yogesh Bhange was a Fellow; his son had a hearing impairment and he worked in this Fellowship of hearing impairment because he had a lot of experience in it. He devised a test in which one can identify whether a child has a hearing impairment at an early age and work on it. This is the building and equipment donated to him by a local company that has every equipment including BERA test and this is the institution in his village.
Chitra Patil is a single woman who she was deserted within a month of her marriage. She joined our single woman’s campaign in Marathwada. Here she is working on Covid relief. She became a role model for almost 19,000 women in four districts of Maharashtra.
We had local state Government elections last year; 314 single women contested and 218 won. So, this is the journey and what CORO does; we facilitate this journey and that is what we do for empowerment. From being a victim to being a survivor to being a change maker and to being a change leader. This is kind of journey that comes when they undergo CORO’s leadership programme. This understanding has come from our own experience and understanding. What we do is a personification of who we are and how we have evolved.
CORO was formed in 1989 with a sole aim of propagation of adult literacy where people like me came together to work for literacy. Seeing adult literacy as a vehicle to mobilise women. Most of us are from privileged backgrounds, well-educated, upper class, upper caste. But CORO has gradually started to become a community-led organisation led by people within the community.
A 1989 literacy volunteer in CORO is our Programme Director today. He is the face of the programme, the leader of the programme in Maharashtra and Rajasthan. So, that kind of transformation is what we call empowerment because empowerment for us is all about – power within. There is immense power in every person to change his/her life and also his or her environment.
The realisation in CORO’s work is the fragment in the sense of identity or sense of fragmented identity of the marginalised community that restrains them from saying what they want to say, doing what they want to do, acting the way they want to act and even feeling what they want to feel and thinking what they want to think. So, it holds them back and if you really work on this sense of identity, make them comfortable with this identity irrespective of what society thinks then the trajectory is changed and the sky is the limit. All those who have come to CORO, enriched themselves in the organisation, they stayed in CORO, and enriched the organisation and started leading in their private as well as public life.
How do you realise your power within and how do we create a facilitating environment for realisation and expansion of that power within. There are three premises to that approach – the initiative of the leadership that the change has to come from within, second, solidarity is the biggest asset of the marginalised community. So, there should be a lot of action from community to come together that has to be done simultaneously and third, we realised that we need a very supportive ecosystem. So, the world doesn’t stop by empowering somebody, if the training is good people would like to act upon it and then hand it over. Otherwise, they will suffer a backlash. So, how do you create that supportive eco-system at a micro-level and at a macro-level. So, these premises have driven our leadership programme.
We believe that power within is there and our socialisation pressurises women to think different, it constructs the adaptive conscience and it is true across strata. What was true for me is true for all my friends in the community. Every time they are told you are a risk, you are a liability, you can’t wear this, you can’t laugh like this, you can’t do this. So, that gets in the way and that conscience is there and adaptive. We adapt and we get comfortable with it. We start accepting it, the culture of silence gets built up on that. So, the whole process of empowerment for us. That is what we have been doing for last 32 years, bringing in the same results on and off. We challenge the adaptive consciousness, that adaptive identity. Don’t think that you can’t do it. A very simple example, we were in a meeting and we were asking the women to speak, one of our friends there said, “I have been all through my life told, don’t speak because you don’t know anything, and here you people are constantly saying speak about something.” So, that is the difference. That difference is encouragement, motivation, that difference is transformative. You realise that you are not doing anything wrong, and you have people to support you if anybody has any questions or if you have any backlash, there is a support system. So, that is how we work.
Fortunately, we have very good funders who understand what we are doing in our programme and respect it. So, always the questions that comes up is, what is the scale? Can you work with individuals to do this? And the leadership development programme, primarily focusing on women’s empowerment is actually the case for that. I mean each of our Fellows, our programme is issue agnostic – people can work on any issue, age is no bar, language is no bar. Only thing is you have to have is that motivation for transformation of yourself and your community. We have always seen when people from marginalised community get empowered, the empowerment doesn’t remain confined to themselves. The transformation from I to we is so seamless because the feeling is that what I have suffered, others should not suffer. That feeling and motivation actually drives the activities to be collective and easily surpass their domain and their empowerment in public as well as private domain. For example, if you attend a meeting and you come to know that women cannot be violated, you go home, you speak something, you get backlash but you try and speak something and tweak the relationship. That gives you confidence and if you can really do something at your family level, your respect in the public domain increases. That feeds back to the family relation and actually this go goes on as a cycle and it empowers you both in public and private.
A woman can be empowered, but how does that attitude of the society that she is part of change?
CORO’s interventions are all facilitated in such a way that I becomes We, in whatever you are doing. so, that is part of making society change. It is very difficult to change deep-rooted attitudes. You have to be very consistent. Our programme on domestic violence and combating gender-based violence works with the family as a unit and not women as a unit. We work extensively with men. We also work with children from school settings to gender sensitise them together because these attitudes are developed at a formative age. So, we have to really work at that age. It’s a life cycle and multi-dimensional approach so, you have to be working at all levels. In our organisation, we try to bring in as many members of ecosystem as well. We have made 350 household as one unit. So, in each unit we have a leader who looks at these households and addresses them etc but does training with young men and women as well. We work with the police system, and the Shatabdi Hospital because these are the two places women run to in distress. So, you have to bring in systemic and familiar things in community layer after layer and you can’t keep any layer unbuilt.
So, if a woman is facing violence from her husband, she may not want to come forward and complain or if she does she would face it even more. So, do you take her in and protect her?
Yes, absolutely. We have legal aid and counselling as well. Homes are by reference. The conditions of homes is really bad, it is almost like another jail. We are working with the government in assessing how these homes are and what can be done. But actually, our main focus is how do we facilitate a community addressing system. So, we have a teacher, doctor who are the members, they are the task force members. In marginalised communities, what works more is the peer pressure. We have excellent women laws, but they don’t come to help because the context is so vulnerable. Our realisation is peer pressure works the best. So, that is what we try and build.
Among the marginalised society, property rights are pretty much non-existent among the women. Is that what you are working on? Is it a long-term problem?
Actually, there are so many complications. We started working in the Konkan region towards this. We started because we have a government resolution which says that the property will be owned jointly by husband and wife. It doesn’t although have any legal standing in the department of revenue. You can only have your joint names in Gram Panchayat records but even then, we thought that it will be helpful to put pressure because that legal journey and struggle is another step. Actually, women don’t have marriage certificate which was a pre-condition. So, anything to do with property rights that many nuance to be filled, in many privileged communities too women don’t talk of the property rights because the upbringing is that women have to sacrifice for brothers and family. So, they don’t dare to speak about this. They are not aware also because they don’t have anything to claim on husband’s stuff. So, the whole property rights campaign has turned into a marriage registration campaign now and that is what we are doing. Unfortunately, the government has some charge if you delay the registration of marriage and that fee is so huge that the women say it is better not to register. So, we are actually negotiating with the government to waive that so, the women can register. So, to answer your question, yes. Women need to claim their property right, they first need property to claim their rights, then they need to come out of the shell of sacrifice etc, then our government system should support her by making the registration easy and accessible. So, that brings about other aspects as well.
Do you see any visible changes in past 10 years?
Yes, absolutely, the changes are not only measurable and assessable but palpable. You need to experience it, see it. There are thousands of women who have come out of their problem and are now mobilising others, sharing and making personal political. They have become role models. 27 of our women were single women and after the Fellowship was over, they decided to build Single Women’s Organization to work on stigma against single women. And actually when we started working with them, the process was so facilitating, the first thing they came up within 15 days of facilitation, they said we need to include a 5th category, that is – women who dumped their husbands. Actually, there is no such word in Marathi, so, in their form they put a word NaTaBa [Navryala Takleli Bai]. 2% of the women who had signed in deserted category, came forward and told us to put them in NaTaBa. Today after 6 years, the mobilisation is 19000 in Marathwada. Powerful, many contested local elections. Visible, they have brought so much change in the cultural domain. They are dressed so well, dancing and playing, they have pushed off the burden that they were carrying until now and it is not only for them, it is with the children as well. there are numerous examples and that keeps the individuals in the organisation going forward.