WUNRN
Women's Feature Service
INDIA - SINGLE
WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION - A FORCE NOT TO BE FORGOTTEN !
By Swapna Majumdar
But achieving this transformation was not easy. Radha had accepted that violence at her husband’s hands was her fate and was ashamed to tell anyone about the beatings. She was also afraid that she would be separated from her son if she complained. She would have probably continued this way had not she met members of the Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan (Association of Single Women).
Nirmal Chandel (in green) has mentored and lent support to
many single women in her hill state of Himachal Pradesh. Photo: Swapna
Majumdar\WFS
Says
Nirmal Chandel, state coordinator of the Himachal Pradesh unit of ENSS, “Even
after we met her, Radha was unwilling to leave her husband. It took us several
meetings to convince her that unless she took some action, she would lose her
son anyway because she would be dead.”
Finally,
Radha gathered the courage to leave her husband, along with her son. Since
2007, she hasn’t looked back and today heads ENSS’s state unit in Rakkar in
Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra district.
Radha
is not the only woman whose life has changed. Several ENSS members shared their
stories of change at a recent meeting held in the Capital. Organised by the
National Forum for Single Women’s Rights, the meeting brought single women
comprising widows, abandoned, deserted, unmarried and divorced women from seven
states together to discuss how their issues could be mainstreamed in the
national discourse.
According
to the 2001 census, more than 39.8 million women are single. This figure is
expected to be much higher in the 2011 census, the results of which are presently
awaited. The issues of single women were first raised in 2000 after the ENSS
was set up in Rajasthan. Started by Astha Sansthan, an Udaipur-based
non-government organisation, ENSS began with a handful of members. Over the
last 12 years, the movement has gathered steam, with 80,000 members across
eight states. Single women have formed state units in Bihar, Jharkhand,
Gujarat, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh,
As
the movement grew, the single women’s collective broke several barriers,
especially of silence. In
Even
while state units continued to reach out to single women, it was found to be
necessary to bring their issues to the national fora in order to achieve policy
level changes, according to Ginny Srivastava, founder of ENSS and co-founder,
Astha Sansthan. To make that happen, in 2009, different state units of ENSS got
together to form the National Forum for Single Women’s Rights (NFSWR) that
lobbies for their rights at the national level. The NFSWR advisory committee is
now focusing on strategies that could be translated, especially keeping in mind
the upcoming general elections. “Getting politicians to include the issues of
single women in their election manifesto is very difficult. We held several
meetings with them to make them aware of the importance of single women’s
rights. We also managed to get a few political parties to include some of our
issues in their manifestoes during assembly elections, after convincing them
that single women now form an important vote bank,” revealed Chandel, who was
herself widowed at the young age of 23.
The
Himachal ENSS unit, working through SUTRA, a NGO engaged with gender
empowerment, has become a force to contend with. It is the recipient of the
Ashoka’s Changemakers Award in 2010 for its success in enabling all 35 single
women in Tikri
Single
women, as an entity, have also made it into the Twelfth Five Year Plan for the
first time, which means that government programmes and policies can focus on
their specific needs.
But
the forum is not stopping with these achievements. One of the issues it is
pushing is the allotment of land for collective farming to enable single women
to access sustainable livelihoods. This demand has been supported by the
National Commission for Women and the National Mission for Empowerment of
Women, both of which have agreed that the government should help women claim
community lands and form farming cooperatives.
Findings
of a 2011 study conducted by representatives of the single women’s group have
validated this demand. Entitled ‘Are We Forgotten Women? A study of the status
of low-income single women in
For
single women, it is a long, hard road ahead. But they are determined to prove
that while they may be single, they are not alone and will certainly not allow
themselves to be forgotten.