Okay. So in this section, we're going to be talking about poor women. And here when I say poor women I'm talking about women who are economically disadvantaged and they may be both within the rural or the urban sectors. But for the most part poor women do tend to be located within the rural sector. Now, the first time poor women came to the attention of the government was really in 1974 where the Committee on the Status of Women was constituted to inquire into the condition of women. And it documented in its report towards equality, it documented the deteriorating economic condition of women. And the report argued that women needed to be considered that the economic contributions of women needed to be considered for development or the economic development of the country to really succeed. So this was the first report. And it was followed in 1988 by another report called Shramshakti which was a study commissioned also by the Central Government of India. And this study documented the impoverishment and marginalisation of women working in the informal sector. Now when we say informal sector, we're talking about the sector which is not regulated by government laws on labour or other kinds of government legislation around… other kinds of industrial legislation. So, we're talking about women working for instance in agriculture, but also petty vendors, traders on the streets, women working in various self-employed occupations. And they're usually very exploitative conditions characterised by low wages long hours, occupational health hazards no job security, no legal protections or social security benefits and low access to credit or capital. Now this report documented the kind of work that women were doing in a vast variety of sectors. So not only agriculture but even within mining, within fishing within the urban and formal sectors as in within petty trading. And documented arrange of these different kinds of occupations and documented the kinds of disadvantages that women faced in this in these various occupations. So this was the situation up until the 1990s. In the early 1990s you had the opening up of the Indian economy, the liberalisation of the Indian economy and you had the establishment of special economic zones for export-processing industries. And many of these export-processing zones would focus in on industries that employed a large number of women, so for instance the textile or electronics industries, or even the jewellery industry. All of these industries, tended to employ large numbers of women. So you did, particularly in these urban or semi-urban areas, these kinds of factories, began to provide some employment opportunities for women. However, what we see in the Indian context is the continuing invisibility of women's unpaid work. That although you had the expansion of some formal sector employment opportunities for women, this very limited and very small sections of the economy, and the bulk of women working in India continue to work in the informal sector and this work is very often unpaid when it is productive work. So for instance agricultural labour that women are engaged in is often work on the family farm so women don't get wages for that. And that’s in terms of thinking about women's unpaid work. But also the invisible, when we're thinking about unpaid, productive work, but there's also another category of women's unpaid work, which is the work that women do within households, the domestic labour. But also the subsistence labour. So, for instance, the collection of firewood, the collection of water. All of this is necessary for the maintenance and the reproduction of households, particularly poor households. But this work is unpaid. And a large amount of women's time an energy goes into this kind of work that is not recognised or undervalued. Not only by their families but also by the national economy. You also see since the 1990's a phenomenon that has been described as the feminisation of agriculture. That is, agriculture continues to be the mainstay for the bulk of the Indian population. Between 60 to 70% of the population still are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. However, the value of agricultural produce is no longer sufficient to sustain families. So what this means is that households have to diversify their their sources of income. So, while you may have a household where you have a family farm. That family farm is no longer sufficient, and to sustain that household. And, so what happens is that the men will seek employment in other sectors in non-farm employment. While the women are are left to continue to to oversee, or engage in the agriculture work. So in a sense it's a double whammy for women because they're not only deprived of those opportunities to engage in the non-farm sector for higher wages because take care of the farm. But they're also not being paid for this work on the farms, so what we've been seeing is a concentration of, not only this concentration of women in agriculture, but a concentration of poverty amongst rural poor women. Now when we talk about poor women it's important also to think about the kinds of different strategies that organisations have have been engaged in. And one of the key initiatives was undertaken by Ela Bhatt, who is the founder-director of SEWA. SEWA's the Self-Employed Women's Association. It was started in Gujarat in the early 1970s. And it was started with the objective of organising women in the informal sector. So particularly in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, which is where it started. It was working with women who were petty traders and working in various urban, informal sector occupations. And it organised them into a trade union. And this trade union was involved in advocating for the rights of these various occupational groups and gainings for instance, the rights of vendors, the licenses of the vendors and recognition by the state government for the vendors. But SEWA was also involved in setting up the bank the SEWA bank. On the model similar model to the Grameen bank in Bangladesh, the SEWA bank was set up. This this association, SEWA, has expanded out of the urban sort of sector into a rural Gujarat and parts of rural India to form you know work through self-help groups of women trying to help women through micro-credit, and improve, not only their individual economic kind of situation, but also strengthen their collective kind of interventions. So SEWA is one of the largest organisations that is working with poor women. But it's not the only one. There are many smaller NGOs that are working in various parts of India, that are focused on making the work of poor women visible and getting recognition for their economic contributions to contemporary Indian society.
