Living in a large metropolis in the US, I have often wondered what the point of a ‘Women’s Day’ is all about.

Yes, much work needs to be done on questions of rights and the environment within which much of the female population around the world leads her life and this has to happen through a variety of awareness campaigns, policy changes, etc – but that should happen all through the year.

In this context, not only did I find this one day dedicated to women pointless but in fact, a variety of corny emails about importance of women and the important women in one’s life as well as the hallmarking of the day made it even disgusting. I actually found an interesting article by Shoba De criticizing programming of Women’s Day with a blistering critique of what it has come to mean.

This March of 2006, leading up to Women’s Day, that I spent in remote parts of Uttaranchal in the foothills of the Himalayas did much to change my opinion.

An amazing amount of work has been done by numerous groups focused on women’s rights, their needs and the life – relating these to health, to lifestyle, to children – as well as to trade, agriculture, biodiversity and the environment. There work is inspiring to say the least.

For example, without romanticizing the process, van panchayats (community groups managing forests) have done very well to conserve and regenerate forests along the slopes of the foothills of the Himalayas. These programs – where they have been successful in being run participatively – have done much better than the conservation and reforestation programs of the forest department at almost no cost to the government. In all these van panchayats, women form a strong core.

One group – Community Action Center that is active in Almora and Birapani – working extensively on the issue of biodiversity in the area actually points out that for a number of reasons, the van panchayats were quite ineffective prior to participation by women. The women now enthusiastically manage both the forests and the forest produce for their own communities.

In addition, one sees a marked difference between slopes maintained by the forest department (often marked by a monoculture of pine trees that actually are non-native and negatively affect the water table and allow no undergrowth) and those by the van panchayats (marked by dense undergrowth and sustained diversity in the flora that actually regenerates the water table and the streams in the cachment areas).

Women’s day is an important day that is used by a large number of campaigns in the area. For example, in a region that has been traditionally feudalistic, caste based and patriarchal, numerous campaigns lead up to meetings on these days – meetings meant to focus on decisions for greater participation of women but also greater interactions among women of different castes. The formation of Women’s Panchayats – a women’s community meeting, discussion forum on local women’s needs – in numerous villages in the area has been a significant step in the success of all these efforts. In fact, these Women’s Panchayats have now become strong enough that the Block Development Officer agreed to build meeting spaces for these community groups.

The day has also helped focus significant mobilization on a variety of issues – from education of the girl child, to role of women in panchayats and health and nutrition for women and the girl child. We see clearly painted signs on all of these issues on numerous walls along the main streets in the village.

As we left Birapani, this remote hamlet in Uttaranchal, a week before Women’s Day, women were busy organizing a federation of all women’s groups in the district. The federation was to be kicked off on Women’s Day but much discussions had to happen before that – how would the various village level women’s groups be represented, what would be the role of the village level groups and what would the federation do, etc.

In numerous ways, these women – much less educated in formal terms – seem to have understood the role of “Women’s Day” more appropriately as a day beyond sending e-cards. Given a variety of issues in our urban societies – from harassment of women in public places to the absence of appropriate environments in places of work or domestic violence – these same strategies can be instruments of civic change more appropriate to the ideas of a “Women’s Day”.

This is not to say that similar processes are not active in urban societies – however, they seem more limited, at the very best. It would be useful for numerous women and ‘sensitive’ men to organize similar efforts in our own lives and communities – beyond sending these sensitive e-cards – educational workshops for men on harassment of women in public spaces, on domestic violence, campaigns on workplace policy, etc.

But, perhaps, we are too educated to be inspired by these simple ideas of some remote corner of India.

- Sanat Mohanty

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