“When ten of us come together, God is with us!”. This is often offered as a simple explanation by the village women of Zaheerabad for the success of the “sangams” they have built, their assured self-confidence, and the ecological regeneration they are affecting in the drought-ravaged heart-lands of the Indian Deccan plateau.
The women, illiterate, poor, living in thatched huts, with no access to education or medicines for their children, with no hope of employment for themselves or their husbands except as agricultural labour when the rains come, ignored by their men folk, despised by the richer upper castes, have over a decade wrought a definitive revolution in their villages.
Now, they manage over a million rupees with which to meet their immediate credit needs. They create employment for their communities in the hard, dry summer months when they carefully improve the lands lying fallow and uncultivated. Since they have created demand for labour, wages have gone up in their area. Since their lands are improving, the harsh environment is becoming greener year by year, and the birds are returning to sing over the fields. Since they manage credit, there are fewer men falling into debt bondage. Since they are careful to use only organic farming and “permaculture” methods of cultivation, everyone eats better, and the children are growing sturdier. Since many medicinal herbs are growing lush in their fields, the sangam-trained women para-medics are able to treat the village communities for all common ailments, referring TB or cancer patients to hospitals. Since they are all now aware of what they themselves can do, they wish to learn more, and run night schools for the adults, creches for the little ones, and a “green school” for the older children.
The women have achieved a quiet revolution with few resources except their pleasant solidarity. And this has been done in one of the poorest parts of the world. Part of their success lies in the fact that they are women. Ratnamma (incidentally, all women’s names end in “amma” meaning mother, in this region) of Algole village, a born leader, with unfailing calm and unshakable presence, says : “Men are different - almost shiftless. Why this is so, I do not know. If a man earns money, he will be drunk for three days. Then he will visit a woman in the town. Then he will buy himself something he does not need. Only then will he think of returning home with a bag of rice. When a woman makes money she will buy the cheapest, broken rice available, for she thinks tomorrow her child may fall ill, her man may be in jail, or a neighbour may need help!” Rural girls marry at an age when richer kids are still at school. From that moment on they work in the fields, tend cattle, plan the economies of their families, and keep the community together through good years and bad, thinking, bargaining, mediating, scrimping and saving. The smallest margins are saved and capitalized. The best seed is hidden in the rafters, and money in a small tin somewhere where no one can find it. The women calculate in what month a pregnant buffalo should be bought, and when sold. They trade labour duty with neighbours for building a wall, or laying a roof, and as they grow older plan intricate family linkages through marriages, which are the only social insurance available to the poor. The men also do all this, but their endurance, and their capacity for long-suffering patience is markedly shorter. Movies engage their dreams with visions of sudden riches; the daily glass of palm toddy lends conviction; and politicians give substance through the corruptions of development. The women seem to know instinctively, as well as through bitter experience, that such dreams will not feed their babies, and bring only immeasurable pain.
What the women have accomplished with the backing of an NGO, the Deccan Development Society, they could also have done alone. But what the NGO offered was a social forum through which they could come together. It was the coming together of “ten of us” that gave them strength to go forward, to plan to save in common, to challenge the powerful, to negotiate terms with them when the great of the village realized the strength of the sangams of the weak. The NGO protected their early years, gave them confidence that they were as capable as men, as powerful as men of the upper castes. The NGO brought them the support of progressive officials, warded off the enmity of the rural rich, and the ridicule of the elite, and helped their husbands to save face when they did not know what the women meant by going out at night to attend meetings!
One of the women leaders, Susilamma of Bardipur village, has faced prolonged and painful conflict, even within her home, before she and her community and family matured to the position where she was allowed to work as a “karyakartha”, or sangam leader. In the beginning her family told her not to go to the sangam. They said she would meet bad men. When she returned home they closed the door on her face and kicked her out. She kept telling her family members that she would work for the sangam no matter what they thought of it. If she went to another village people would say she was only a woman and what did she think she was doing? Susilamma felt that she was not doing anything wrong. She was in fact working for the poor. All people worked. Why should she not work, particularly in something so good for others? She told her husband : “if I do anything wrong, beat me! But I am not a bitch and I will continue to work for the sangam!” Her in-laws were angry and told her husband not to let his wife work on the streets. Her village people laughed at her for wearing her sari ‘pallu’ over her left shoulder and said she had become fashionable. Despite all these beatings and scoldings she kept working. She also knew a thing or two about the others. For a year and a half her husband kept beating her and abusing her. He told her to leave the house but she asked why should she leave, that was her house. Her husband like other men was always in the toddy compound getting drunk, but women like herself were steadfast. Later her husband said it was all right for her to work in their own village but she should not wander from village to village. Still she continued her sangam work and keep explaining what the sangam was to her husband, even before her elders. Once she told him : “I am not a child, don’t beat me. If you beat me for doing sangam work I will go as far as you!” He left the house for three or four days. Susilamma was reluctant to tell what exactly happened but slowly the story came out. Her husband drank pesticide when she shouted at him for having wasted rupees 200 of their money. She ran in the night and went to the kapu landlords house, fell at his feet, and asked for a tractor to take her husband to the doctor. But there was no driver. She ran to Ramulu driver’s home and promised to pay him anything he wanted. On the way to the hospital her husband vomited all over her and her brother-in-law accused her. She insisted on talking to the doctor herself and said that her husband had drunk pesticide mistaking it for a tonic. She said this to avoid a police case on her husband. She sold her anklets and spent several hundred rupees on medicines. Even the headman gave the doctor rupees 200. Afterwards her husband was so ashamed. He did not step out of the house. She threatened to leave home and go to her mother’s house. Since then he has changed.. Now he listens and thinks about her and the welfare of the family. He has stopped drinking and gambling and saved for her daughter’s marriage. Perhaps he is secretly proud of her.
The Deccan carries half the world’s poor living in the semi-arid tropical belt that also stretches over the Sahelian region of Africa, north-east Brazil, and parts of Mexico and the Celebes. Continuous droughts in the mid-sixties forced the Indian poor to cut down their forests in a desperate bid to scratch a living. Those were terrible times when India begged for grain from abroad, people starved, and large numbers left home and village to migrate to cities in futile search of work. The Deccan lost its forests, and the monsoon washed away its fragile top-soil layer to silt up tanks and reservoirs, water-log delta regions, and make it that much harder for the poor to live on the land.
The princely state of the Nizam of Hyderabad, once acclaimed as the world’s richest man, has also left enduring marks on the poor. In many of the villages of the interior Telengana region feudal values still hold a sway, with the landlords, whose own wealth is crumbling with the environment, still controlling the villages and the land, holding many in debt as bonded labour, and exacting tribute and allegiance from all.
Those who suffer most are the women of the lowest castes, who as agricultural labour depend on the powerful to provide work.
While the harsh social and environmental realities of Telangana are not unique, they offer one of the worst picture of exploitation, and of the poverty trap from which development policies, shaped in far-away Delhi or remote Washington, have failed to rescue the people. Voluntary agencies have mushroomed in India to meet the challenge of ineffective global policies tailored to suit elite interests by western-university trained experts. Community self-help has a long history in India and as “constructive work”, was raised to the level of a moral force in the freedom struggle by Mahatma Gandhi.
The Deccan Development Society is an NGO among others, based on the Gandhian principles of “Antodhaya”, or serving the last first, and of “Gram Swaraj”, or achieving genuine independence at the village level through self-reliance and self-sufficiency. To these principles, the NGO grafted the need for ecological sustainability, and the Chinese vision of developing “barefoot” experts from among the community.
After years of struggles and mistakes, the group catalyzed the emergence of sangams of poor village women of the lowest castes. At a basic level a sangam is a thrift and savings self-help association. But its meanings reach deep into time. For the Buddhist, a sangam is one of “the three jewels”, as crucial as Dharma for salvation, and mirrors the early Christian Church of a few, who are met in His Name. In present-day India’s political space, it is a social seed of enormous potentiality. If it finds roots and bursts out, it becomes the organization of self-governance for the poor, replacing the decayed traditional village political structures. It is a training ground in self-conscientization for the disinherited. It is the village spring for the re-creation of a vibrant rural economy, which till two hundred years ago produced sophisticated products, particularly colourful and delicate Indian fabrics, that sold around the world.
The DDS sangam women live in 60 villages at the western tip of Medak district of Andhra Pradesh which border on similar dry and dusty villages in the states of Karnataka and Maharashtra. This is the heart of the ancient Deccan plateau made more bare and brown by the present generation, that depends on timely rains to grow the hardy millets that form the staple “rotis” of the poor, some sparse red and green gram for their “dals”, and onions and bright red chillies to spice their food. Buttermilk when available is welcome, though strong tea is a great sustainer. Water is always scarce, and during droughts women trudge several miles through the heat to collect a pot full of dirty brown water from the sunken bottom of deep wells. The great trees are gone, and lean buffaloes and goats graze under shadowless accacias, and the predatory Latin-American prosopis that came into the country thirty years ago, and is known to the people as the “government thorn”.
The story of Ratnamma of Algole illustrates the struggles for survival that the poor constantly wage in the region. She comes from a village which has long been neglected by government, and development authorities, partly because the elite of the village seem to have preferred to keep things that way. She seems to be the first person to have brought the wind of change to her village, and as a low-caste woman from an agricultural labour family, Ratnamma confronts a lot of hostilities from the community. However in a very quiet manner she has continued not only to protect herself but also bring about changes. All of this has required a combination of courage, persistence, hard work and shrewdness.
She comes from Kohir and was married into Algole a year before puberty. As a child she played with dolls and was favoured being the last child by her mother and five elder brothers. She never worked in her mother’s house except, perhaps, for looking after her brother’s children from time to time.
Her family had no land but had plough bullocks and would take them to work on other people’s land. She would accompany her mother and learned a lot about agricultural work by playing and watching. Her parents were bonded to a brahmin landlord who thought her very smart. He would buy her a blouse and white sari, and everybody called her smart. All her childhood friends were girls of her caste and they would all go to her grand-mother’s house to play with her.
When she came to Algole she started working as a coolie. They would get up at four in the morning and go to work early. She always left early for work and never wanted to stay at home. There were only two other women who worked so hard. As a young girl her job was to peel sugarcane for crushing at 50 paise a day. She worked twice as fast at this job as the others. She always wanted to work better than others. Nobody told her to do this. House-hold work she had learned as a child from her sisters-in-law, each of whom took turns to do something. For example, if one of them made rotis, that is all she would do that day. She learned all of this, because she believes that you cannot just sit and eat. Some people think like that, but she thinks only those who work hard can improve.
Within four and half years of marriage she had three daughters. Her husband whose first wife had died had another daughter. He once came home and said he did not want her. He had brought a cart and she must go home. She refused to leave and he said, but he had already paid the cart-man rupees 10. She said if he did not want to waste the money, he should go. Later her husband was sorry and said he would not do it again. Ratnamma is confident that even if she had gone, he would have come running to fetch her back.
While she worked as a coolie, he cut stones. Her father-in-law died and her mother-in-law took away the two cows and one buffalo they had, to give her daughter, and said since Ratnamma was smart she did not need them.
She leased in a buffalo and a goat. The buffalo gave her one and half of litres of milk morning and evening which she sold at rupees three per day. After feeding the calf there was still half a litre milk left for the family to drink. She saved five months milk money and collected rupees 750. The goat also had kids. She sold two goats for rupees 300 and one kid she gave back to the goat’s owner. Like this she kept saving money so that they could have a house. After the buffalo gave birth to a male calf, she returned it to the owner, sold the calf, and with the money left bought another buffalo. That buffalo gave milk for eight months and she still had one goat left.
In the meantime her husband became a bonded labourer for a year because they had to marry the daughter of his first wife.
Ratnamma by this time had saved rupees 2000 and she bought stones with this money for her house. The first year she got slates for the roof and in the second year laterite stones for the walls. She gave rupees 500 to a man to buy a bullock, and in return he brought her on his cart enough stones to complete her house. She also got 40 bullock carts of mud at one rupee a cart for the plastering. They looked around for wood. In Kuppanagar village there was an ancient neem tree with stone idols beneath it. No one dared touch the tree, because they feared a devil lived in it. Her husband bought it for rupees 100 and cut it down for wood for the house.
To build viable communities in such a region requires more than grit, patience, and the ability to cooperate, all of which the women have. It requires ecological skill to regenerate degraded land and bring it back to life. Ratnamma of Humnapur, with a soft charm that can grace any salon, has welded a dissention-less sangam in her remote village. A bare rocky hill-top now burgeons with ten thousand trees, watered patiently by the women, who all summer long kept the saplings alive by carrying water up the hill in burnished brass pots, balanced and erect, in a single straight line. But Ratnamma had to fight for her hill.
Her very first fight was with the Sarpanch or village headman. He did not want them to develop the wood-lot on the hillock and said that was grazing land. She had arranged for 30 women to come from Igrampally village with crowbars to remove the stones. The Sarpanch asked who was this shrew, and where she learnt all this. She said the Government was taking up such programmes in many villages, the order has come from there and he should not blame her. He asked whether the Collector had taught her to be smart. She argued that they also knew what they wanted, and all other villagers were doing the same. He threatened her that he would get villagers to come and finish her if she continued. She said she was not scared. She would go ahead. He wanted the Igrampally women to go back. She said no. They could go back without doing work. They had come for wages and they must get wages. She stood her ground and the Sarpanch went away.
Chandramma of Bidekanne village, her strong face etched in a ready smile, is a permaculturist to the core. The six-acre, rock strewn shelf given to her by the government was not abandoned by her as worthless, as other landless people have done with land distributed under land reform. She has sculpted the land with contour bunds, planted leguminous saplings, kept part of the land for trees, part for herbs, and a third at the bottom of the shelf for millets. When others’ fields wither, hers is still green. Susilamma of Metalkunta village, despite her youth is a respected forester, organizing the afforestation activities of several villages for the government. Without the sangams, the women could not have discovered these skills and capacities in themselves. Nor the courage they have. Susilamma says: Previously, if a woman talked to a man in the street, her husband would take her home and nicely beat her up. After the sangams were formed, even men have learned that sangams are for their own good. Now women can talk straight to Patels, government officers, and others, while previously only men handled such affairs.
In sangam meetings, the women sit and talk a lot. “We said, more we fear, the more they scare us. So it is important not to get scared.” Even in the old days, before they had a sangam, women would of course talk. But they would normally talk about their work or what went on in the village. For example, if a kapu landlord said: “Why don’t you also collect some grass for my buffaloes when you work in my fields?”, the women would talk about this and ask why they should do this free work, but they did not talk about their problems or family issues. Now “ten women sit together” and they talk about all problems. One woman says: “My husband beats me, wont let me go out,” and another says: “My husband cooperates.” So the beaten woman gains some courage.
Sangam women have also learned to go jointly to a household where a woman is ill-treated and ask why the man does this. They all went to Shantamma, Siddamma, Pentamma and Kamalamma’s houses to question their husbands for ill-treating them.
For example, Sushilamma’s father’s younger brother behaved like this. He refused to let his wife come home after attending a sangam meeting. “We went to his house. We said, We did not go for any bad work, but only for good work. He said, We suffer at home. There is no one to cook, look after the children or feed the cattle. We asked, Why can’t you manage even for one day? You could have given a little flour to a neighbour and she would have cooked you some food. You men go out for days, even for a year. You go with other women. How do you think we manage? He said, It is different for men and women. Women cannot do anything they please. I said, We will forgive you now but never do it again, and we left. He has behaved since then.”
The women have gained social status as well. As Narsamma of Kalmela village puts it, a few years ago they would not have dared to speak in public. Now, village headmen invite them in, give them a chair, and negotiate business. And after an evening’s meeting a woman can get home, riding pilion on a bike behind some man! The fact that she manages to lease in a large acreage of fallow land, bring it back to life, and helps her sangam to reach towards food security has added to her stature. But working the land on close margins requires considerable skill.
Under Narsamma’s leadership two fields of 16 acres were divided into two plots: One plot of 13 acres which they used for irrigated sugarcane. Another field of three acres for rain-fed crops mainly for personal cultivation. However, they have been able to get two crops in one year out of their rain fed plot. A very beautiful multi-cropping system was developed by the women. Narsamma says they all sat and discussed what they should do.
People always observe, she says, and they were able to design a very efficient and intricate cropping system to take the best advantage out of the lie of the land.
Initially, after paying the rent with the loan from DDS - of rupees 13000 - they purchased a pair of plough bullocks for rupees 6,200. Forty bags of urea at rupees 3,500 were also purchased by them and each member contributed four cart loads of manure, roughly costing rupees 25 - 30 per cart load. For watering the fields they engaged a person at rupees 250 per month, and in all they paid him about rupees 2,600. The patel also gave 11 tractors-loads of manure.
From the small field of rain-fed crops they got the following crops:
Wheat, oats, maize, sorghum, chickpea, safflower, onions, garlic, field beans, groundnut, chillies, tomatoes, mustard, and fenugreek. All of the produce was shared equally with the landlord. Their share of wheat was six bags (market price rupees 350 per bag); 11 bags of oats; 11 bags of sorghum (market price rupees 230 per bag) which was sown as a second crop; 16 bags of chickpea and 7 bags of groundnut(market price rupees 600 per bag) also sown as a second crop. They say they planted the wheat where the land retains more moisture, whereas safflower was grown on the border drier regions. They planted 60 kg of maize seed all along the border of the field essentially as green cattle-feed. All of them have one or two calves and these were allowed to graze along the borders of the fields. People offered them rupees 300 per week to harvest the maize but they refused. Only once did they sell rupees 700 worth of maize stalk. Similarly the field beans were essentially meant for their buffaloes. While it is good to eat they felt it was better for the buffaloes and broadcast the seed throughout the field. Onions and garlic they made into bundles of 10 kg each and 20 bundles were their share. Each member got rupees 100 worth of onions and garlic. Similarly they got 30 kg of chillies which were also sown on the borders. Tomato they had in plenty and since they were selling at 25 paise a kg they just ate all they could when they worked on the fields. In addition, they grew some mustard and some fenugreek and with their safflower crop they made pickles and “chutney” for all their households. A circle of banana trees in a corner belongs to the patel but he gave them some bananas. There are also a standing row of large mango trees around the field belonging to the patel who sold the mangoes for rupees 2000 and gave them rupees 500. From his 20 tamarind trees each member got three kg worth of tamarind which costs rupees 10 per kg. For the groundnut crop, she sent away to various villages for the seed. People who went to work on daily wages to Basanthpur, and other places, kept back the groundnut they were given. They saved the seed along with the patel’s seed. Out of the produce seven bags were given to the patel and they kept seven bags which were mostly eaten by the children. Six bags they retained for next year’s seed. Similarly they got 10 kg of fenugreek and each member took away a glass-full for cooking. Each member also got a mud-pot full of mustard.
Narsamma says that their cattle had all the food they needed from the stalk and crops from this one field, and “till yesterday they were eating their sorghum and wheat”. In all, she took out 60 quintals of produce from these three acres.
Chilkamma of Krishnapur is even more skillful in land management. The profits made out of working one parcel of land is used to acquire more fallow land. By rotating its profits, Krishnapur sangam is turning into a manager of large-scale cooperative farming. Without a political revolution, the age-old individualism of the peasant has been overcome by the women, who are establishing a new mode of working the land without benefit of ideology.
Once the institutional support is available, technical skills are grasped with firmness by the women. Tuljamma understands the needs of a community health service as well as any experienced doctor. Summamma is a more convincing lecturer than many an academic.
Narsamma of Pastapur, a top leader among sangam notables, is mistress of the varied skills of sangam organization, credit management, and cooperative housing construction. A woman with the astuteness and confidence of a business leader, she has skillfully managed the construction of several houses by her sangam members. She lobbies with government, and negotiates deals between members, and organizes effective meetings which close with manageable decisions. Not only are the houses built by Narsamma constructionally sound but they have been built at the lowest cost possible - almost half of what government contractors used to charge in the area. Further, since they involved the participation of the inhabitants at every stage of construction, each house is very different from the other and has several little features like cupboards, shelves, niches, and other decorative elements built into the house. As mentioned before, the door-posts and shutters of many houses have been beautifully carved by the local carpenter. She has also allowed each household to add any features they liked though the government opposed such additions. For example, kucha constructions like lean-tos and cattle sheds have sprung up besides their walls. Kitchen gardens are another feature as well as flowering trees, and trees for fuel and fodder. The cluster of houses give the appearance of a community, and are not built in regimented rows like most government constructions. Best of all is the feeling of happy habitation that a visitor gets, unlike government structures which right from the start are abandoned or used to store fire-wood or dung. In one house, dry bajra heads of corn have been beautifully tied together to the ceiling as a centre-piece because the owner wishes birds to enter!
The sangams offer a hope that viable communities can be built up, as the land is regenerated ecologically. Food security inches forward technological skills. Cooperation being the basis of success, community self-governance becomes an attainable goal. The sangam women are path-breakers, and now they know it. Can they show a way out of the poverty trap? Their husbands are beginning to understand them. Perhaps, even experts will soon learn to listen to these chatelaines of the poor.
