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Copyright by Shubhra Sharma 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Shubhra Sharma certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Empowering Women or Institutionalizing Women’s Agency: An Ethnography of the Mahila Samakhaya Education Program for Women in India Committee: _____________________________ Kamala Visweswaran, Supervisor _____________________________ Charles Hale _____________________________ Kamran Asdar Ali _____________________________ Syed Akbar Hyder ______________________________ Norma Moruzzi Empowering Women or Institutionalizing Women’s Agency: An Ethnography of the Mahila Samakhaya Education Program for Women in India by Shubhra Sharma, B.A., M.PHIL. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas of Austin December 2005 For Arti ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research for this project was made possible by the International Education Fee Scholarship, offered by the University of Texas at Austin. I was able to spend two years in Delhi and Banda district (Uttar-Pradesh), conducting interviews with women associated with the program. I would like to thank everyone at Nirantar, Center for Women and Education, Delhi, for providing me unlimited access to their archives and sharing their most current work in the field of education. I thank each member for their love and generosity each time I was in Delhi. I owe another round of gratitude to all the women in Karwi, Chitrakoot. They always made me feel as if I never left and that the city was indeed a home. I hope I have represented you accurately in these pages for all the women who come after you. To the people in Jaipur and Delhi, I am thankful for their time. This project has been made richer by their insights on the program and the changing face of policy process in India since the 1980s. I thank my committee members for reading innumerable drafts of this lengthy manuscript. Their critiques saved this project from being only a memoir. In 1996, my mother had stood at the departure gates of Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi, and bid me goodbye without a tear. She knows that she is the only reason for me to have persevered in a new country. This success I owe to her in a large measure. Another measure is attributed to my brothers—for packing my bags for me and sending me off to neverland. They know that finishing this project is my revenge! I, however, dedicate this manuscript to Arti. My mind denies that she is gone but, to me, that means she still lives and especially in the pages of this dissertation. v Empowering Women or Institutionalizing Women’s Agency: An Ethnography of the Mahila Samakhaya Education Program for Women in India Publication No.____________________ Shubhra Sharma, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisor: Kamala Visweswaran The central argument of this dissertation is that programs of empowerment or those that seek to foster women’s agency infact pose problems for it in and through their institutionalization. It selects a government sponsored education program for women in India (Mahila Samakhaya) to produce a critical ethnography of its institutionalization and of its effects on women’s agency in Banda district of Uttar-Pradesh. Institutionalization of a program here refers to institutionalization of education in the rural context of Banda. The process involves two stages: recruiting local women as functionaries/ agents and creating frameworks/ institutions for education through the assistance of such functionaries. Experiences and articulations around empowerment are therefore relative to the levels of responsibilities vis-à-vis the program’s institutionalization at the grassroots. Infact institutionalization complicated women’s experience of empowerment. Even as the process fostered women’s individual agency in similar/ different ways, the rules of structuring/ structured interventions subverted the formation of a women’s collective. This weakened women’s bargaining power in matters regarding their agency. Dissent and self-reflection were penalized elsewhere in districts where the program continued to function after 2001. This ethnography then raises concerns around feminist vi theory and praxis. If institutionalization is inevitable under conditions of globalization, then it is imperative to rethink and reconstruct feminist spaces for critical reflection regarding governance, development, and women’s agency in the same context. The survival of the “ultra-poor” is contingent upon the responsiveness of policy to their changing lived realities/ needs within its actualized framework, than upon its theoretical sensibilities. vii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 “EDUCATION FOR WOMEN’S EQUALITY AND EMPOWERMENT”: THE MAHILA SAMAKHAYA PROGRAM 29 CHAPTER 2 INTRODUCTION TO CHITRAKOOT: SITE OF STUDY 52 CHAPTER 3 INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION/TEACHING A CURRICULUM: THE SAHELIS’ EXPERIENCES 73 CHAPTER 4 INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION/FORMING VILLAGE-LEVEL COLLECTIVES: THE SAHYOGINIS’ EXPERIENCES 103 CHAPTER 5 INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION/IMPLEMENTING A POLICY: THE COORDINATORS’ EXPERIENCES 137 CHAPTER 6 INSTITUTIONALIZING EDUCATION AND MAKING/ WRITING POLICY: THE BUREAUCRAT, THE THEORETICIAN, AND THE ACADEMIC-CONSULTANT 177 CONCLUSION 227 BIBLIOGRAPHY 238 VITA 258 viii INTRODUCTION This dissertation argues that programs of empowerment, or those that seek to foster women’s agency, pose problems for such agency in and through their institutionalization. This dissertation selects an educational program for women in India (Mahila Samakhaya or MS) to produce a critical ethnography of the process of the program’s institutionalization and of its effects on women’s agency in the Banda district of Uttar-Pradesh. MS was first instituted in the Banda district in 1989 as a pilot project. Banda is a region known for its anti-female bias and the lowest rates of literacy for women in the state and country (Sen and Dreze: 1997). The program claimed to produce a new kind of woman through a new kind of education—one who was empowered to question and change her lived realities from an informed position (Ramachandran: 1995). The government of Netherlands funded the project, but through the aegis of the government of India. Selected women’s groups and academics had the freedom to structure and implement the program with government support, but without bureaucratic intervention. The resulting ethnography is concerned with the effects of institutionalized education on rural women’s agency in the Banda district of Uttar-Pradesh. Here institutionalization refers to constituting frameworks or structures, hiring agents, allocating resources, and building strategies for putting into place a formal system of dispensing education to local women in a context in which none existed. Within the context of MS, institutionalization specifically referred to creating a top-down management structure that included local women, using the movement approach to forge 1 women’s collectivities and, through it, to manufacture a demand for education, and then allocating resources for schools where such a demand could be met. The argument of this dissertation is that the drive towards institutionalization, instead of forging women’s agency, problematized it. If the premise of the program was that education is the means to an end, where the end is women’s collective and individual empowerment, then, in institutionalizing education, the premise was lost or even reversed, to the detriment of women’s agency. Institutionalized education subverted women’s collective agency, while also circumscribing women’s individual agency. As frameworks became standardized, they became inflexible and less responsive to the women’s needs. Further, reflection and debate were not only discouraged, but also penalized. As such, debate and openness were deployed as a strategy to put frameworks into place, but not to enable them to evolve in keeping with the transforming needs of the context and the people within it. Managing people became more critical than granting people ownership of such processes. Making frameworks stable became more critical than evaluating how such a process forges (or does not forge) women’s agency. Recent literature on institutionalization primarily focuses on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and has been particularly critical of their management style and increasing dependency on international aid (Lewis: 2001, Kamat: 1999, Salmon and Anheier: 1999). These factors, it is argued, also has distanced the NGOs from their social movement roots and recast them in the likes of the state, bureaucracies, and market- oriented institutions they had resisted. The literature focuses more on the evaluation of 2 institutions, as they exist and function, rather than on the process that constitutes them (Lewis: 2000). Thus, to increase the effectiveness of NGOs, the literature suggests changes in management styles and increased people-level participation. As such, the literature recognizes that a drive to institutionalization has eroded movement-based approaches to development, yet fails to mount a fundamental critique of institutionalization itself in favor of such approaches. This project is concerned with a particular process of institutionalization that was sponsored by the state at the local level and the problems that institutionalization posed for women’s agency therein. Through multi-level articulations of