Meghalaya has always been touted as a paradise for women by misinformed journalists and researchers from outside the state and country. This misconception afflicts even the heads of financial institutions. There are some who unknowingly or with the ignorance that besets many from outside Meghalaya term this a matriarchal society. Meghalaya is a matrilineal society where lineage is from the mother’s clan. Ancestral property is vested with the youngest daughter who also is the custodian of the inheritance to which all her other siblings have the right to use as long as they are unmarried or when they become widowed or divorced. The youngest daughter does not enjoy social mobility because of the responsibility of looking after her parents until their last days. Many a youngest daughter is known to sacrifice a lucrative career in order to avoid leaving her hearth and home. Not because she does not want to but because she cannot leave her parents in the lurch.
Women’s empowerment in Meghalaya is mostly a jargon that is bandied about in conferences and seminars. In this State we do not have gender disaggregated data on health. Gender blind allocations cannot be measured for outcomes. Women suffer from many more illnesses than men because of their biological systems. Child bearing is often a tightrope walk between life and death. High maternal and infant mortality continue to plague Meghalaya because only about 19% of women give birth in hospitals and are therefore accounted for. The rest who give birth under traditional healers are left out of the statistics. A gender disaggregated data in health, for starters would help to measure the outcomes gender wise and perhaps help to address the lacunae in service delivery. Sadly, Meghalaya has not been innovative in this area.
Many policy planners still like to believe that pushing money into a woman’s bank account will facilitate financial empowerment and make her a statistic to be counted in the financial inclusion data. But things are not so simple. Social mobilisation is a time consuming, continued process which requires committed capacity builders and hand holders. In many other states there are NGOs doing this work. In Meghalaya this is still at a nascent stage. There are stray examples that do not make the rule. If women are to be empowered they need to be trained on how to claim their rights, to speak for themselves, and above all to demand equity of representation in the traditional institutions. Unless this happens we are only tilting at the windmills. Government cannot hide behind the excuse that it cannot offset or upset the traditional patriarchs who rule the roost and therefore circumvent the process of equal representation of women and men in decision making bodies. A sensitive Government cannot allow the status quo to continue. It has to take this issue head on and train women to claim their rights.