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  For long, the ‘population control’ policy of the Government of India, backed by international funding agencies, has resulted in extreme violence towards poor women in India. Fifteen women from poor and oppressed communities died in a ‘sterilization camp’ in Chhattisgarh in 2014.31 Between 2009 and 2012, fifteen women died every month due to botched sterilization operations in similar camps.32 The ‘population control’ campaign is now likely to boost violence on women’s bodies, and shame poor women for bearing ‘too many children’.

  At a jan sunvai (public hearing) organized in Delhi by the Right to Food Campaign in 2016 on maternity entitlements, the chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) said that women must help themselves and not expect the government to solve their problems. When Neelam, a woman worker, was testifying about being denied maternity entitlements in her first two pregnancies, a representative of the National Commission for Women (NCW) interrupted to comment that she appeared to be pregnant for a third time. When Neelam said she was, the NCW representative began to scold her, saying: ‘Don’t you know better than to keep having babies? Don’t you know there should be a gap of at least three years between babies?’ The public hearing was meant to be a space for women to speak about how the government had failed to provide them the entitlements they needed to ensure their dignity as women and mothers. But both the NCPCR chairperson and the NCW representative sought to absolve the government of responsibility, while the latter chose to make it an occasion to blame and shame women.33

  Quite apart from the tendency of ‘population control’ campaigns to inflict humiliation and violence on women, these campaigns are also likely to have a communal subtext. In Gujarat 2002, Modi had infamously called the relief camps for the pogrom-affected Muslims ‘baby-producing factories’.34 On 11 July 2019, just a month before his Independence Day speech as PM, his Cabinet minister Giriraj Singh addressed a rally in Delhi on World Population Day, demanding a Population Control Law.35 At that rally, a song played from the dais, ‘Jansankhya visphot se apni azaadi ko khatra hai/Hamko gaddaron ki badhti aabaadi se khatra hai’ (Our independence is in danger from population explosion/We are in danger from the rising population of traitors). Singh made a speech calling for a law to prevent the decline in the population of Hindus and curb the growth of the Muslim population. Participants in the rally branded Muslims as unpatriotic and irresponsible for bearing too many children even if they were poor and worked as cobblers or at repairing bicycle punctures. The ‘love jihad’ bogey is integrally tied to the myth that Muslims marry Hindu women to increase the population of Muslims.36

  Modi’s ‘population control’ campaign is likely to be another pretext to brand Muslims as unpatriotic and encourage discrimination and violence against them.

  The Microfinance and SHG ‘Revolution’

  During the Noughties, governments in India began to push microfinance as a panacea for women’s empowerment and poverty alleviation, in keeping with the neoliberal model of development. Surely, you will ask, microfinance institutions (MFIs) and self-help groups (SHGs) are doing the right thing by giving women affordable loans and financial empowerment and independence? That’s what we’ve been told for decades.

  The touchstone by which any policy for women should be judged is: does it challenge and dislodge unequal and oppressive power structures and ideologies, or strengthen them? As we’ve seen, policies against sex-selective abortion and open defecation have tended to strengthen rather than challenge such structures and ideologies. The same is true of MFIs and SHGs as well.

  The neoliberal model sidelines any structural critiques of the economy or social relations (class, gender, caste and so on). Instead, it suggests that the rational ‘choices’ of individual women, based on individual self-interest, could empower them—not despite but due to their tendency to ‘conform to gendered expectations or collude in the oppression of other women’.37

  The microfinance model appropriated the feminist idea of collective action—ridding it, however, of solidarity and instead framing women as individual entrepreneurs who would discipline and police each other. While appropriating the feminist vocabulary of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’, the MFIs and SHGs drew upon, reinforced and even celebrated women’s subjugation to unequal and oppressive patriarchal structures, arguing that this subjugation made them better borrowers.38

  The hype around MFIs got a rude shock when fifty women committed suicide after being harassed, publicly shamed and hounded by MFI loan-recovery agents in 2010.39 That’s when the skeletons came tumbling out of the MFI closets. The MFIs charged exploitative rates of interest and resorted to humiliating and violent recovery methods in the style of moneylenders. Each suicide case was found to be linked to severe harassment by the companies in the name of loan recovery. Some were forced into prostitution to pay back their loans and many had to flee their houses and leave all their belongings behind.

  A government study even found:

  Some MFI agents themselves are encouraging the debtors to commit suicide so that their loans are repaid. This happens because the borrowers are covered by insurance . . . The MFIs draw up an insurance cover for the borrower at the time of loan disbursement. In the eventuality of suicide, they recover the amount under the Loan Protection Fund (LPF) by which 10 per cent of the loan amount is deposited with the RBI, which repays the remaining loan amount due from the defaulter.40

  The coercive and exploitative behaviour of the MFIs should have been no surprise: CEOs of MFIs made no secret of the fact that they saw the poor as lazy and unproductive, needing coercion to keep them disciplined and productive. This is starkly illustrated by the example of Vikram Akula, the CEO of SKS Microfinance, one of the MFIs that enjoyed the greatest penetration in the rural districts of Andhra Pradesh in 2010 and was implicated in many of the suicides. SKS followed the typical MFI trajectory: beginning as a ‘not-for-profit’ unit using grants and metamorphosing into a for-profit non-banking financial company (NBFC). In 2006, Akula figured on the Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, along with Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, and was awarded the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award by Sonia Gandhi.41 In 2010, SKS became the first MFI in Asia to go for an IPO listing on the stock market, attracting a record Rs 1600 crore, with a 5.8 million loan base, mainly among rural women in Andhra Pradesh, and a loan recovery rate of over 99 per cent.42

  SKS recorded a spectacular increase in profits—from Rs 2 crore in 2008 to Rs 174 crore in 2010. Many of the people who committed suicides in Andhra Pradesh were SKS borrowers. SKS’s phenomenal IPO listing provided affirmation that the business could assure its shareholders of reaping fat profits through ‘double bottom line returns’. They made sure that the women in SHGs policed each other in paying their weekly instalments, forcing them to take responsibility for each other’s payments. The company made an easy killing of 30 per cent interest on all loans. (Many MFIs took up to 60 per cent from the women by adding various other fines and figures for which they did not account.)

  Akula and other MFIs claimed that while many of the people who committed suicides were MFI borrowers, it was their debts to traditional moneylenders and not SKS that led to the suicides. What can we make of that claim? Akula’s book—A Fistful of Rice: My Unexpected Quest to End Poverty through Profitability—gives us a clue.43 Akula says in the book that he modelled SKS on Walmart and McDonald’s. The book indicated the weapons of public humiliation and shame deployed by SKS to recover loans:

  When we started . . . people decided to test us by not paying . . . We instructed our loan officers not to leave . . . until the repayment came . . . The entire village would realize there was some issue . . . And that person would lose izzath—lose face. Losing face is a fairly devastating thing in a village context, and people will do anything to avoid it.44

  The book also tells of an instance where a woman took a loan to buy a goat but used it to buy food. Akula’s assistant told the woman: ‘Buying food does
n’t generate income, so you’ll be no closer to getting out of poverty that way. Either buy a new goat or give us back the loan money.’45 Buying food to address hunger was unprofitable and unproductive from the point of view of SKS. In such circumstances, where a woman is being humiliated for her inability to pay back a loan, or where she is being pressurized to return a loan that was used for consumption rather than for investment, she is forced to take more loans—often from traditional moneylenders—to pay back the MFIs. As she borrows from Peter to pay Paul, she is drawn deeper and deeper into the debt trap and is finally pushed to suicide.

  It’s important to remember this devastating experience now as MFIs once again attempt a comeback in India, bringing distress and suicides in their wake. In June 2015, two women, Namita and Sita, from Purshottampur village near Varanasi in UP, committed suicide because they were unable to repay loans they had taken from seven MFIs. Several other women in UP villages have fled to escape the MFI debt trap.46 After the demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes by the Modi government in 2016, several women in Karnataka found themselves contemplating suicide, unable to repay loans taken from MFIs. One woman said, ‘The representatives of the microfinance institutions verbally abuse us if we are not able to pay the instalments.’47 Women have not taken this lying down; in 2017 they held protests against the abuse and harassment by MFI loan-recovery agents.48 In 2016, women in four districts of the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra protested against coercive recovery practices of MFIs.49

  In 2013, the then Union minister for rural development Jairam Ramesh admitted that microfinance had failed and was ‘not the miracle it was touted to be’.50 Ramesh contrasted the MFI model with the SHG one, saying that the bank-linked SHG model was a successful Indian innovation in microfinance.

  But studies of SHGs have shown that they, too, are ridden with many of the same problems as MFIs: most notably, a tendency to instrumentalize and exploit the structural disempowerment of women, rather than ‘empower’ women to fight oppression and inequality. A study by the feminist organization Nirantar in 2007 found that for SHGs, as for MFIs, ‘it is not the interests of women but their vulnerability that makes them attractive loan-takers’.51 So, senior district bureaucrats in Gujarat explained that women make good debtors because, unlike men, who ‘may disappear for days’, ‘women can’t go anywhere, they can be located easily—they cannot run away, leaving their homes; they can be persuaded to repay easily as they feel shame more quickly and consider non-repayment as a betrayal of family honour’. The Nirantar study found that the SHGs were using ‘existing gendered norms relating to a sense of shame and honour’ to create peer pressure on women to repay loans.52

  We have seen in previous chapters how women’s lack of mobility, their confinement to the home and community, and notions of ‘family honour’ are at the root of much violence that women in India face. If this very vulnerability is what makes women attractive clients for SHGs and MFIs, how can the latter ‘empower’ women?

  Women members of SHGs were not encouraged to take up issues of gender discrimination, unequal division of labour or violence in their households. Instead, as their labour for the SHG projects, which includes ‘free labour for implementation or monitoring of government services’, increases, they bear the dual burden of household work as well. Yet, government officials monitoring SHG schemes perpetuate the myth that women usually ‘sit idle at home’ or ‘sleep in the houses idly’ and SHGs provide them with work ‘so they too can contribute to their families’!53 The official in charge of monitoring and evaluation of the World Bank-funded Swashakti SHG network vehemently opposed including any discussion of women’s unequal social and economic status, saying, ‘If we start teaching those things then our whole society will collapse and we will have no values and culture [left]. Whatever we do it should not destroy our family system.’54

  The study observed:

  In all of the articulations related to the benefits of SHGs . . . women are being more and more closely identified with the institution of the family. This overwhelming focus on the family undermines the idea of a woman as an entity, with rights, interests and needs, which the women’s movement has long been struggling for.55

  The SHGs do not encourage women to recognize and collectively resist the structures of class, caste and gender and challenge the patriarchal notions of the ‘good woman’. Instead, they ‘harmonize traditional forms of gendered socialization with new forms of what it means to be a “good woman” in a neo-liberal economic framework’.56 As a result, the SHGs tacitly impose dress codes on women, shaming women who chew paan, dress in old cotton saris rather than polyester ones, or do not oil and tightly braid their hair. Inevitably, it is women from Dalit and poorer households who are marginalized in the process. Further, instead of creating collectives and solidarities that break the caste barriers, SHGs tend to create caste-based groupings that are more effective to create peer pressure for loan recovery.

  The Nirantar survey also found that while state governments, banks and corporations were benefiting hugely from the SHG networks, the SHGs were failing women on the very reason for their existence: providing credit to women. The survey found that ‘90 per cent of the SHGs that save deposit their savings in banks. However, only 42 per cent of groups have received credit from banks.’57 So governments, through SHGs, help financial institutions expand their credit base in rural areas, roping in poor women in their net, while claiming to usher in ‘development’ and women’s ‘empowerment’.

  The SHGs and MFIs that are at worst exploitative and at best unhelpful are used by the state as their alibi to evade all accountability to implement ‘programmatic or policy-level changes’ to ‘empower’ women and reduce poverty. The state uses SHGs ‘to project itself as the promoter of development while increasingly passing the onus of development to the poor, based on their own resources’.58

  We’ve seen how the schemes and campaigns led by the state, the World Bank and other funding institutions not only avoid supporting women’s assertion and autonomy, they, instead, leverage women’s lack of autonomy and mobility. In Hindi, there is a saying, ‘Jis laung se bhoot bhaga rahe the, bhoot usi laung mein tha’ (You were trying to exorcise the ghost with a clove, but the ghost was hiding in that very same clove)! The very same schemes and campaigns that are touted as ‘empowering’ the poor and deprived women deliberately reinforce patriarchal ideologies and structures. We’re told that various desirable outcomes justify these anti-feminist means; but, as we’ve seen, this is far from true.

  Is there an alternative? I believe there is. We need to recognize, first, that there’s no ‘smart’ shortcut that can ‘fix’ women’s problems. Feminist movements that fight to transform the entire system, with all its oppressive and exploitative social and economic structures, are genuinely empowering, because they build solidarity and collective strength that give individual women the confidence to fight for their rights. These movements that fight the system aren’t ‘negative’ as our rulers claim: on the contrary they’re the most hopeful and positive forces we have, because they believe that inequality and oppression can and must go, and they invest their time and energy in creating this change. Women who join these movements experience real, tangible changes in their everyday lives. Whether it’s an abusive husband or an exploitative boss or landlord, they know they aren’t alone in facing troubles. Solidarity is truly the only way for women to feel empowered and strong. Market-led ‘smart’ schemes that isolate women and force them to compete with and police each other disempower women.

  As part of these movements, we need to hold governments accountable and make sure they don’t wriggle off the hook. We need to demand government investment—in rations, in drinking water and sanitation, in public and household toilets, in fuel, in affordable and good-quality government schooling and colleges, in public health, in wages for women workers (such as ASHA, anganwadi and midday meal and SHG workers who subsidize government schemes with their free labour), an
d in ensuring more courts and judges, so that criminal and civil cases can move faster. Periodically, Indians get angry about how women are treated in India—and rightly so. But the problem is that the governments are easily able to divert that anger into demands for the death penalty for rapists in some cases that are fortunate enough to receive media attention. It costs governments nothing at all to echo and amplify those demands: we think we’ve won, and they continue to short-change women, slashing funding for public health and education, and for schemes for women. They let big corporate honchos (the Vijay Mallyas and the Nirav Modis) run away with lakhs of crores of people’s hard-earned savings, while men and women who are unable to repay ‘micro’ loans are hounded to suicide. We need to stop letting governments get away with this trick—we need to make them put money (remember, it’s our money) where their mouth is, and prioritize what women’s movements demand.

  5

  Factories as

  ‘Families’

  Families, households and organizations like khap panchayats are hostile to women’s autonomy—but modern workplaces, connected to the globalized market, enable women to assert their economic and social freedom. Right?

  Wrong.