Today is International Women’s Day. It’s a day when the word “women” will be the most used one after “empowerment.” What does this day mean for the ordinary woman slogging to bring food to the kitchen after a hard day’s struggle? It’s not easy to be sitting by the roadside, ingesting the dust and bearing the heat and storm. For such women, their peers sitting under a makeshift ‘dukan’ covered with a plastic sheet is any day better. But come rains and the strong winds of March then even the plastic roof is blown asunder. That’s the livelihood pursued by thousands of women in Meghalaya. And no, they are not complaining. All they want is a fair chance to trade their wares in a decent space for that is the only livelihood they know. In so many decades, not much economic space has been created for women to earn a decent living. Job creation both in the private and public sector has not found traction. Tourism as the only viable industry has created a few jobs and many women have self-started businesses in the sector opening up home-stays, restaurants, tea shops etc., which have all gone up in smoke owing to the pandemic. No assessment has as yet been made as to the cumulative losses incurred by such small businesses and whether they are in a position to pick up the pieces.
This is not to say that the pandemic has not hurt the other genders. Every entrepreneur has bled and is still bleeding but women have had it worse because most or all of them support a family. Not a few are women abandoned by their partners/husbands and bringing up their children. Maintenance is not something that women in a matrilineal society or any society can get without a legal battle. And when the man is himself a struggling daily labourer how does a woman wrest anything out of him without losing her self-respect! It is not easy for those in governance to understand the plight of a single mother unless they walk in her shoes. Gender sensitivity is a learned emotion. It comes with some training but it comes better from observing women who struggle to make an honest living. It is for such women living at the margins that policies need to be made so that they get the first nudge towards economic empowerment. Only then will the word ‘empowerment’ have meaning. Only then will women be able to take decisions that affect their health; only then will they claim their reproductive rights and stop becoming baby producing machines. Till such time, International Women’s Day will only be a token observance.
Women need to push the government to craft out enabling policies and come up with gendered budgets, because no one will do it for them. This is where women’s solidarity groups come in. So far this has not happened in Meghalaya.