Feminist engagement with post colonial developments
Devaki Jain
September 10, 2018
Good evening friends I am happy to be at IIHS, and also to be able to share my recent publication with you. This book is one of the two volumes and is in this form only because of one of your earlier colleagues, Arpita Das. I had no intention of bringing out my work over decades in volumes, as is the mode these days, for old people. But Arpita badgered me into doing this and in retrospect I am glad to see them in this form.
These two volumes, and we will only address the second one today are selected out of about 55o lectures, essays, and documents prepared over the years 1995 or 1998 till about 2010, for the UN, government, universities conferences. None of them were prepared for pure scholarship– this is an important rider, to the character of these papers they are meant for users, not academic journals. In that sense they are activists.
What do they amount to? They amount to a walk, you may call it,that I took along the road of examining the data/ statistics that are provided by the Government of India, particularly of work, economic contribution of women, visible and invisible and the macroeconomic logic, which determines policy and programs.
The essays in sum are anargumentagainst the definitions that describe the economies of the South and thereby misdirect policy. The essays traverse territories such as errors in data collection coming out of erroneous perceptions ofwomen's location in the economy. Government in the states as well as centre and their policies arecriticised for poor understanding of reality. Finally, the essays argue for a new theory of economic growth which can pull up thelowestring of the economy and aresistance to purely capital led growth.
The essence is to point out deep flaws not only in identifying women and their work but the presentation of the GDP- a crucial statistics in both assessing a nation’s progress as well as the components and continues by arguing that the GDP is misleading figure. When it is broken down to unmeasured items, it is revealed that 90% or more of the GDP of India is coming from small scale and handmade and household industries whereas the public investment and financing of institutions and government goes to the corporates who are actually providing much smaller percentages of the GDP.Overall the book argues and suggests that it is crucial to reconsider economic reasoning on which current policies are built. It also pleads that the women’s studies movements and the researchers to look into ideas and theories and see if reconstruction can be made out of theory, and a meaningful economic programme.
An underlying criticism is that much of the ideas, vocabulary and the domination comes from the former empire and thereby mislead the former colonies which are now called the ‘emerging colonies’, from finding their own path to economic and social progress.
I seem to be hostile to the word ‘Development’ and its content as it is practised. So I have essays like 'Development as Waste' and 'Healing the wounds of Development' and so forth. What I am getting at is that the practice of development which I believe has descended from immediate post colonial ideas. At the time that we liberated ourselves from the British and other countries slowly liberated themselves from colonisers- the empire, the countries which colonised us offered advice and finance to help us to get out of the situations of poverty and inequality. There was something called 'development aid' which came from the US and the Britain and so forth and the partner for these aids was the government. There was a structural adjustment programme.
These initiatives coupled with the support of finance and design I suggest and I found were most inappropriate for the socio- economic, ecological and geographical conditions of our country. I argued that while exploitation of resources was considered development, we were underdeveloped because we had not exploited it enough. The exploitation of resources in order to sell raw materials to the former colonisers or to industrialise according to their pattern was actually responsible for a lot of deluding of our resources as well as shifting of our environmental strength.
Development is the colonisers additional gift to us and so forth. I struggle with the question “is it possible to design our development by learning from the ground?”
So, many of the essays are on what kinds of efforts are being made to enable people to come out of poverty and deprivation but I also suggest that when we find a 'successful project'- project which has reached the goal of enhancing the living conditions of the households and their economic and social strength, then there was a rush to multiply it, to rubber stamp it all over the country. And this led to its collapse because one cannot rubber stamp an innovative project in one part of India into another because it depends very much on the resources, the cultural practices of the people, the condition in which they are living, the inherited skills and so forth. So that’s why I have argued 'Letting the worm turn' i.e. let the worm come out and spend a little time, turn the earth before you put it up placing somewhere else.
My entry into the women’s studies was to challenge the female work participation rate being given by the NSSO at that time and to do a very detailed study of women and men and their hours of economic engagement to rectify that. One of the essays in this book writes about that study which was then published in EPW which then became the foundation of time use studies in India. I would recommend to those of you who are doing research here that short and dirty time use studies are a very good way of checking out what is the impact of a project on people especially women and children, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, and how one recreates the project’s design to make it not so punishing.
Let me give you an example:
One of my earliest books was called Women’s Quest for Power where a group of us who formed the nucleus called the Institute of Social Studies decided to visit what we call the women-friendly and women-dominated projects. So naturally, SEWA came to us and we wrote a profile for SEWA. Then the next was the Amul project in AnandGujarat. So, of course we visited the villages and met the women who reared the buffaloes and did a quick what I call short and dirty time use study of about 50 or 60 women who were actually, what we call, milk producers. We found that normally the women who did not have a buffalo in the house would any way be working probably for about 10-12 hours. They would wake up at 6/7 and go to bed by 7 or 8. But once a buffalo was added to their house their work from 10 hours became 16 hours because apart from feeding and washing the buffalo, they were milked. After milking the buffalo, the milk was taken to the point where the van came to pick it up. Then again in the night the buffalo is fed and cleaned. So, the women who could sleep 6 hours or 8 hours earlier hardly slept for 6 hours and were often unwell. These household surveys yielded knowledge on what is called women’s work which was invisible to both the project designer and the data collection system. Dr. Kurien welcomed us and soon a health program was set up as well as other … (can’t understand the word).
In Karnataka, the World Bank supported a project to upgrade the silkworm so that the silk which was woven is of better quality. So, a new worm was introduced. There was a question was there a gender dimension? The answer was no, - the only related work that women did, they said, was to make garlands out of the old empty cocoons. So, many men were trained. But what was missing was the fact that it was women in very small huts and shacks that were almost mothers to the worms. The worms were kept in trays inside a house, and as one of the women whom I had interviewed at that time told me, that the worms had to be fed continuously every 3 hours including at night. So women gathered the leaves during the day, cut them and in the night fed the worms. These women would first put the leaves in the tray and would simultaneously clean what I would like to openly say the ‘shit’. The worms really left a lot of that.
The new worm that they were bringing, the new seed, was a sophisticated hybrid and required a different kind of “nursing”, tremendous cleanliness, so the task was women but they were not reached out to- so worms died , women were sick!
My real interest is reflected in Chapters _, is to not only critique the macroeconomic policies such as the kind of investments that are being made- the design of project but also measures such as the GDP. You will see that most of the essays, towards the second half of the book, are deeply statistical with many references, not only giving quotations from NeelkanthMisra of Credit Suisse who has been writings regularly on how the GDP is a misleading figure. He argues that more than 80%-infact he uses the figure 90% but I doubt that- of India's product comes from small scale and home based production. And only 10- 15% comes from the large corporates but he says the policy directs itself to these large corporates because these other chaps are not registered. Now there is much more focus on small scale industry in the last 5 years because it has been found that they are the major producers of goods and services in India and so you begin to see some tax and incentives being given to them.
Further you might have noticed that when the finance minister calls business people just before the budget is announced, he calls the major corporates to ask their advice on what is required but those who are not called are the large majority of small enterprises and home based industries- what do they want?
So in many ways what one is arguing is that whether it is database or the policy, it is misdirected but that is not enough in terms of my work.
I have also examined Pikettty's hypothesis and theory (in one of the essays) and building on his work I have talked about the theoretical implications of inequality. Because the simple logic is that as long as there is inequality,there is hierarchy of power in the economic domain and which powerful group will surrender their power and their capacity to the less powerful. Therefore, the inequality is at the base of the distortion in our economies and as you know it is increasing.
So most of my papers address this phenomenon of growing inequality, the increasing number of the world's wealthiest in India and how that kind of economic phenomena has emerged largely because of the macroeconomic reasoning in our policy, whether it is Manmohan Singh or NarendraModi. Infact in my critique of the economic policies of the South, I point fingers at Dr. Manmohan Singh when he was the Secretary General of the South Commission and I was a member and the South Commission was led by Julius Nyerere- a great freedom fighter. I point fingers at the South Commission's failures to develop an economic theory and economic reasoning and ideas which are suitable to the colonies. The whole idea behind Julius Nyerere's South Commission was that we have to claim the economic and social characteristics of our countries and build an economic theory and practice policy design which draws on our strengths.
And not necessarily get so over-dependent on international capital and its walk towards more and more investment in resource utilisation. So I go back to where I began that is, colonisation was a way by which the industrial countries sucked up our natural resources and gave themselves wealth but now these countries, our countries, are colonising in a similar way the less privileged countries. Indian capitalist go to Africa because Africa still has a lot of 'un- utilised resources'- minerals, land as indeed are the Chinese. We have become predators replacing the white people as economic logic has not changed.
Is there a way out of all this? This is the question that we have to address. Obviously we cannot upturn what is happening right now but with my participation in Feminist Economics I found that many great feminist economists such as Diane Elson are talking of the importance of rethinking the economic measures and economic practices but will we ever be able to put that into place is a question that obviously I cannot answer but hopefully the generation which I hope is predominant group here today will put their minds to development economics- drop the word 'Development' and talk of 'Growth Economics' and how to make this growth have a road or journey which is more equitable, less destructive of natural resources and less creating of dependencies. I am not even arguing that it should be women led or women designed but certainly looking at women and what they do, what they know would be a good starting point?
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