In the scorching heat in Patoda near Beed, women are busy in the cotton field. After every few minutes, they douse a cloth they have wrapped around their head and faces in a water bucket to save themselves from the heat. They continue to work relentlessly as an old man is busy watching random videos on his phone and a couple of youth are resting under the tree.
In many villages across the Marathwada region of Maharashtra, Dalit women have converted barren grazing patches of land into cultivatable fields so that they could grow for their families and also earn money to educate their children by taking the produce to the market.
The first major challenge for them is to meet the basic development indicator -- the level of jowar or bajra flour in the storage container. “The flour storage container in households reflects the level of development the family has achieved. As long as the container is full of flour and women are able to feed their families, the basic level of development is achieved and this is the development indicator women themselves have evolved” says Beed-based Manisha Tokale.
When there was no land resource the containers were empty and poor Dalits in villages depended on the food grains given by others.
Right from the United Nations to the Union Government, experts and politicos are busy defining what development means. Poor women farmers in Marathwada, know what it means to them.
The land movement
From the pre-Independence era, the Dalits in Marathwada have been allowed to hold grazing land and cultivate it. The Maharashtra Government made the holding legal in 1972, 1978 and in 1991. But even today majority of cultivators are left out of the legalisation process because they could not prove that they cultivated the land. They don’t get any legal documents of the land they cultivate including 7/12 extract, electricity bill, and registration of crop, insurance or compensation. Land activists demand that the government needs to conduct a survey and issue another Government Resolution (GR) that those who were left out of the legalisation process will be covered now and land titles will be transferred to them.
Development and dignity
Geetabai Gaikwad in Osmanabad, Kanta Ichake in Beed, and many other women who have taken control of grazing land and cultivate it say that landholding has brought development with dignity.
Kanta Ichake says that as women control the cultivation, they were able to pay school fees for their children and there is the young generation in the community which is now educated. “So we are not just fighting for livelihood. Education is the key and also many women in the land movement are active in village politics. From meeting the basic development indicator—full containers of jowar or bajra to educating the next generation, women here define and achieve development on their own” says Manisha Tokale.
Development has to be achieved and not bestowed by others. These women are the flagbearers of Dr. B R Ambedkar’s emancipation and development movement that has taken roots in the region.