Transcriber: An Nguyen Reviewer: Keira White
So the year was 2016, Chakthi Amal lay on the bed,
on the ward of a local government hospital.
She was a double amputee.
She had been abandoned by her three sons, for the second time.
Only this time, the path had been different.
She had been left on the road to die.
A truck ran over her and she was brought here.
Her pain oscillated from numbness to delirium, and through it all,
she narrated her signature recipes, one by one.
As the pain ebbed, she caught the arm of a volunteer and said
she wanted to work for her upkeep.
I share this story with all of you here today,
because that incident taught us
a very powerful lesson, that regardless of her socio-economic cultural circumstance,
every woman wants to be empowered.
We want to be able to make the choice of our lives, for ourselves,
for our families, for our immediate communities.
We want to be responsible for ourselves.
Chakthi Amal won the support of the NGO,
plans were made to set up a kiosk.
And we saw the spark returned to her eye, but unfortunately,
she did not live to see that dream of empowerment come through.
As we go deep down into the ground,
there are five significant factors that impact women's empowerment
and these form a predictable pattern.
These challenges become insurmountable, when stacked against
the deep caste and class divide that divides us all.
And when it comes to marginalized,
vulnerable women from extremely oppressed communities,
these challenges are terrible ones to endure and come out of,
and this is the focus group that I would like to focus on today.
Without a doubt, education is the biggest enhancer to empowerment.
However, when faced with economic duress, economic struggles,
women and children are always the first to be left out of every radar.
Let me share the statistic with you.
The right to education,
a foreign policy brief of January 2021, puts this figure out:
Ten million girls are at risk of dropping out of formal school education
owing to the pandemic.
This is alarming because when you peg it against pre-pandemic figures,
pre-pandemic figures taught us that women dropouts,
girl drop outs at school was lower than that of boys.
When you pull girls out of the education system,
there are natural repercussions that follow.
They get kicked into this endless, vicious cycle of poverty, trafficking,
violence, early marriage and therefore, early childbirth.
Education enhances opportunity, but when there is no formal education,
we turn to skill development
and this is where I'd like to share the story of three beautiful women.
Right after the second wave,
many NGOs began working with extremely vulnerable marginalized communities,
particularly women and children who had
lost their spouses to the pandemic.
And these figures of women drop out, were reflected in these figures.
Out of 34 families that lost their primary breadwinner to the virus,
only 23.4 percent of the women had gone beyond school.
Many of these hadn’t gone beyond intermediate school and 1 out of this 34,
had no access to education at all.
When we bring this, distill this conversation deep down to
the transgender community that we work with.
Of the 200 or so trans persons we are connected with, only 14 are graduates.
Many of the rest haven't gone beyond primary school.
In the absence of education, skill development comes into play
and we picked these three women:
Nancy, Lakshmi and Shanthi,
of course, their names have been changed to protect their privacy,
and put them through a skill development program.
All three women had been happily married to amazing men.
They had been cared for, protected and led lives
as happy homemakers, pre-pandemic.
When the loss hit them,
Lakshmi was 39, she had been married at 15 and now,
was the mother of a college-going student and a school going child.
Shanthi, on the other hand,
had never stepped outside her house without her husband.
She did not even know the way to another part of the city.
Without him, she was on the brink of losing hope
that she could become the breadwinner and care for her two adolescent sons.
Nancy had some semblance of an understanding of tailoring,
but did not know how to make that into a viable, sustainable income.
Three months into the skill development program,
we were witness to a beautiful transformation.
These three women had become the best of friends.
They were sharing recipes.
They were sharing YouTube videos, watching over each other's children.
They were lending each other strength by just leaning in.
When we invited them to talk to their fellow sufferers.
Their stories became powerful testimonies to other women.
They provided this light in the midst of a very dark and bleak tunnel.
We have education, we have opportunity, then there’s always this big question of
pay parity that all of us are struggling for.
Pay parity affects every woman,
every gender that identifies as women, across socioeconomic strata,
from film stars to construction workers.
But never has it been more obvious,
than those working in extremely vulnerable communities.
Take our transgender friends, for instance,
for the 14 girls who have now become graduates, seeking employment has always,
invariably resulted in the employer looking at their job opportunity from
from a very patronising lens,
rather than the rubrics of skill assessment,
skill capabilities and aptitudes.
This holds true for women from oppressed castes and communities as well.
So finding suitable jobs for them becomes extremely tough.
This is where we saw the emergence of solidarity amongst transgenders.
Amongst the transgender population we work with,
the senior trans woman always forms a protective round of
protection around the younger transperson,
in the absence of social support, societal support,
this ring of protection becomes a young trans woman’s only shield.
Pay parity is all about remuneration.
What about this onus of care giving, this very gender specified,
gender specific role that women take on,
regardless of whether they're contributing to family incomes?
Let me share another statistic with you.
Oxfam India takes 3.26 billion
as the number of work hours that every girl,
child and woman puts into the care of others.
That totals it to 19 lakh crore rupees
every year to the Indian economy,
19 trillion rupees, that is.
Let’s pause and take this figure in for a moment.
Women and girl children spend 3.26 billion hours into caring
for their immediate families.
This is the number of hours spent in empowering others.
Where then is the question for self-empowerment?
It's not even a dream for most women, let alone a ray of hope.
So what then is the solution?
This is where this magic of self-help groups comes into play.
Self-help groups have not only provided means
for women to take some claim of financial independence,
but they also act as this ring of solidarity amongst them.
In 2019, we set up an informal
self-help group for 10 of our transgender friends.
The financial model of the self-help group was a dismal failure.
Repayment was never on schedule and when it was, it was less than 10 percent.
But what has emerged in the two years since, is these 10 trans-women,
today speak as a collective voice of one.
Whether it is fighting for relief during the pandemic times
or a job opportunity for one of them, or to care for a group of them.
They speak as one voice and this, my friends,
is the power of collective will,
that translates to sisterhood.
This is the 10 of them who form part of this
self-help group that I'm talking about. All these are given.
Women also get access
to resources only as a secondary resource.
The United Nations Women’s Watch warns us
about the impending climate crisis that we’re even fighting at the moment.
It says, in the climate battle,
women are likely to be left out far more than men.
They are going to be impacted more simply because of two reasons:
One: Women are traditionally poorer than men.
And second,
they are dependent on their everyday income on men, largely.
We bring this conversation down. The same holds true for medical care,
destitute care, elderly care.
In the four years of our work, the local hospital,
of the 2207 cases of elderly abandoned people
that we worked with, 800 were women.
We managed to reunite 500 of these elderly people with their
families, but only five percent of women were taken back.
This is the same statistic that reflects amongst the homeless.
Take Ishwari Parthi, for instance,
This Ishwari Parthi, who is
left and deposited on the outskirts of a temple by her only son.
Every time the volunteers took food for her,
Ishwari Parthi would immediately take it and share it with
a bunch of stray dogs that she had made her own.
The canines became her family. Lakshmi Parthi, on the other hand,
started caring for a fellow homeless being who was far sicker than her
and did so until both of them were relocated to a shelter.
What this taught us, these women have nothing with them,
what this taught us is you stack all the odds against
a woman in this whole world and she still fights for community.
This is a woman’s strength. This is arguably her strength.
In India, we cannot speak of women’s empowerment without addressing
the elephant in every room.
The caste class dynamic
and the deep patriarchy that’s entrenched within this caste class divide.
Every one of these factors; education, pay parity, opportunity,
access to resources, care-giving, everything becomes
an innumerable number of times more difficult for a woman from
an oppressed caste community,
simply because she is rarely allowed to take decisions for herself.
Decisions are made, always, by someone who has more power than her,
has more privilege than her and has more advantage than her.
How do we change this, my friends? There are two powerful agents.
The first is the power of choice that each of these women have chosen
for themselves and for their immediate world.
The second is this enormous power of sisterhood
that we have realized, working on the ground.
Brings me to another story, we’re all seated
at an informal gathering in an auditorium,
the NGO that works with these women shares
the story of every family, for the benefit of the larger audience.
A hush follows every story
because what has happened to every family is unspeakable.
And then, almost like a deluge, one of the women stands up.
She speaks of her troubles as nothing at all.
She offers her assistance to anyone in the group.
She offers to look after the children,
whilst the women may want to go out to work.
Another woman stands up and for two hours,
this endless circle of giving goes on.
This tears swept auditorium is now jubilant with optimistic energy.
Everyone there feels that they too, will emerge, maybe scarred,
but not beaten for life.
I leave you with the possibility of a dream,
a dream that all of us wake up one day to find ourselves as a snowflake,
a small, incredible flake of white,
falling from the sky, waiting to be nudged into flight.
And then, suddenly it happens, a gush of wind,
a step, a hand upturned towards the sky,
a push and there begins this unstoppable journey of a snowflake
turning into a snowball.
Here is this incredible flake of snow that has suddenly discovered
the unbridled joy of tunnelling through the mountain with abandon
and discovering fellow runners on the way.
This is a snowflake that shares energy with its fellow runners, along the way.
This is a snowflake that has suddenly discovered that
the ability to move mountains is actually within its grasp.
If a snowflake can snowball, we too can, can’t we?
Here’s to sisterhood for all of us.
Thank you.