Chirag Kasbekar

Anandi's endeavours in rural Gujarat have given voice to marginalised women, helping them demolish gender barriers and build more meaningful lives

It was only when Time magazine named this small group of inspired women in their list of 'Asian Heroes of 2003' — in recognition of their remarkable efforts to stitch together communities torn apart by the post-Godhra communal carnage in Gujarat and bring justice to the victims of violence — that the Indian media took notice of an organisation called Area Networking And Development Initiatives, better known as Anandi.

Subsequent newspaper and magazine articles talked of the courage Anandi's members showed by going deep into some of the most violence-affected rural areas of the Panchmahals-Dahod district of Gujarat (of which Godhra is a part), even as crazed mobs took over the area. But they missed the bigger story. Just as important, if not more, is the valour and self-belief the organisation has instilled in thousands of women across the tribal regions of eastern Gujarat as well as in Saurashtra since 1995.

Anandi was formed by five women development professionals committed to putting the concerns of poor women at the centre of the mainstream development agenda. With support from the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, the organisation is now driven by four of the five original founders: Sejal Dand, Nita Hardikar, Sumitra Thacker and Jahnvi Andharia.

"We chose communities which were economically and socially marginalised, where the woman's lot was particularly miserable," explains Ms Andharia. "Instead of making unnecessary assumptions, we concentrated first on just trying to understand women's own concerns and helping them address those problems themselves. Where they couldn't help themselves, we showed them how to negotiate with the institutional power structures."

It wasn't easy in the early days for the Anandi team to gain the confidence of these women, even to get them talking. "They tell us now that they often wondered what these city girls were up to in a village like theirs. But they began talking with us hesitatingly and, once they were comfortable with us, we were able to establish a relationship of trust."

Most of the fieldwork Anandi is currently engaged in is conducted in two diverse regions of Gujarat: the poor and hilly tribal district of Panchmahals-Dahod in the east and the disaster-prone Saurashtra region in the west, where people are not so poor but the social structures are feudal and orthodox.

Everything Anandi does is guided by the vision of a peaceful, just and equitable society. While men do face injustice and poverty, women feel it more because of gender discrimination. This has made the struggle for gender equity a key component of Anandi's agenda.

The best way to achieve this goal, Anandi believes, is to make women the vehicles of their community's development; to help women stand on their own feet. In all of the organisation's efforts - crisis relief work, basic needs provision, community development, livelihood creation, better governance - the key strategy is to build women's own capacities and self-belief. Anandi is only a catalyst for change. It facilitates and guides their activities, but it is the women who take the lead, even make most of the decisions.

A good example of this approach is Anandi's initiative to improve sanitation in some of the villages it works in. With village commons diminishing, toilet space was also getting reduced. Initially, the villagers didn't want toilets in their houses. So Anandi decided to offer sanitation blocks, first to the elderly and the handicapped. Soon entire families were using these toilet blocks; the technology adopted did not give off bad odours. Families with young girls realised the safety and hygiene aspects the most. Having created a demand for construction of sanitiation blocks, Anandi introduced another strategy of training and engaging women masons to build and install these blocks.

Women who otherwise might have done low-wage unskilled work on construction sites were trained by external engineers to move up the value chain and become masons. Soon other villagers started giving them work and even wanted them to build their houses. Now their own families see them as significant wage earners and not just as earning subsidiary incomes.

Anandi realises that for women to be able to help themselves in a sustainable manner, they need to build their own social capital. They need to organise and push for change, not only at the local village level but also beyond. For this, women are organised in federations at three interlinked levels: at the village level, the village cluster level, and the sub-district level.

At each level there are regular meetings to share experiences, discuss solutions to problems and plan activities. One innovative feature is the 'area networking event', or fair, which is a two- or three-day event that provides a common forum for rural women from a particular region or even across regions to talk to each other and also to experts, researchers and government officials.

The fairs have been hugely successful in motivating women and improving their self-image. The idea is to get women to perform as many different tasks as possible — leadership, accounting, finance, administration, logistics, addressing large meetings, dealing with government offices — in order to build their capacity. All the groups are democratically structured.

Anandi's belief is that learning is best done in a bottom-up fashion. Women learn from each other through the networks they have created and the experience gained through their work. Anandi merely facilitates the process and supplements it with a range of training programmes conducted by its own team, external experts or by some of the women themselves. It also gives invaluable capacity-building support to the women village sarpanchs in the area, so that they can do their jobs without fear and without domination by the men.

As part of its commitment to bringing the concerns of women to the centre of the development agenda, Anandi does important work in sensitising officials and policy-makers to gender issues.

This model has been successfully applied in a range of initiatives: from fighting gender violence to helping women meet basic needs (especially health), managing natural resources, developing livelihoods, providing credit to families that need freedom from moneylenders, and helping communities manage the various crises Gujarat has been through recently.

"Anandi's work has led to a significant change in perception among women about themselves," says Jasmine Pavri of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. "Breaking the culture of silence, women have started asserting their rights within the family, community and society at large. Its activities have made a sustainable contribution to changing gender inequalities and building women's own capacities for collective action, thereby reducing poverty in their own households and communities."

Ms Andharia says a lot of this has been made possible because the Trust gave Anandi its support even though the organisation's goals were far from concrete. "Our open, trusting and flexible relationship has been very helpful. They had confidence in us even though we had 'process goals' rather than tangible ones. We deal with the development of human beings and this needs the kind of flexibility that the Trust has willingly given us. We are now in a position to leverage our processes and simultaneously undertake tangible, result-oriented work."

To enable Anandi to pursue new avenues of interaction, the Trust has recently given it a corpus grant of Rs 2 crore for its core activities, and a one-year grant of Rs 33 lakh for basic activities in the implementation of its five-year strategy plan.

Even as the organisation itself matures, many women already have a lot to thank Anandi for. As one of the women said of the changes that have come about in their lives, "Once we were like frogs in a pond; now we have wings."

Uploaded on March 2005