‘Empowerment in Practice and Its Impact on Political Participation’: A Study Among Working Women of South Kolkata

The main purpose of the present study is to understand ‘empowerment’ as observed in theory and in actual practice in the society where women are still regarded as second-class citizens inspite of achieving success in their chosen fields. Her freedom in choice of decision-making within the family and civil society plays an important part in influencing her participation in politics and her voting behaviour. By political activism of the respondent we primarily mean her cognitive orientation (i.e. her knowledge about political parties, symbols, their stay in power and their judgements about political system), evaluative orientation on how political system works including her voting behaviour and partisan preference. Survey was carried by the researcher on 1000 women working in both the organised and unorganised sectors of the economy mainly among street vendors and domestic workers and bank employees and teachers in Kolkata. Results: Women working in both the sectors play dual role looking after their children, elders in the family, husbands and also contribute to the  expenditure but lack effective power in decision-making. They consult their husbands, elder members of the family or the community before casting their vote and are notguided by individual preference or choice.The main purpose of the present study is to understand ‘empowerment’ as observed in theory and in actual practice in the society where women are still regarded as second-class citizens inspite of achieving success in their chosen fields. Her freedom in choice of decision-making within the family and civil society plays an important part in influencing her participation in politics and her voting behaviour. By political activism of the respondent we primarily mean her cognitive orientation (i.e. her knowledge about political parties, symbols, their stay in power and their judgements about political system), evaluative orientation on how political system works including her voting behaviour and partisan preference. Survey was carried by the researcher on 1000 women working in both the organised and unorganised sectors of the economy mainly among street vendors and domestic workers and bank employees and teachers in Kolkata. Results: Women working in both the sectors play dual role looking after their children, elders in the family, husbands and also contribute to the  expenditure but lack effective power in decision-making. They consult their husbands, elder members of the family or the community before casting their vote and are notguided by individual preference or choice

Revisiting the Marginal Locations of Muslim Women on Various Sites in India

Dominant discourses on Muslim women have revolved around their marginal locations in commu-nity as well as in society. It has mainly been subjected to socio-economic and political structures and conditions as well. However, it is worth mentioning that marginality is not only a lived experi-ence but it also has metaphoric dimensions. The state of marginality relates not only to the poor socio-economic status of Muslim women but the politics of representation of their identities like veiled, passive as well as meek victims in various discourses also constructs the core of their mar-ginal location in the larger society. Therefore, the marginalisation of Muslim women seems to be visible in various discourses in India. Briefly, the paper will attempt to comprehend the undercur-rents functioning behind the construction of the very concept of marginality and locate Muslim women in popular and academic discourses on marginality

'Bhavishya Shakti: Empowering the Future': establishing and evaluating a pilot community mobile teaching kitchen as an innovative model, training marginalised women to become nutrition champions and culinary health educators in Kolkata, India.

BACKGROUND: Malnutrition is a global emergency, creating an overlapping burden on individual, public and economic health. The double burden of malnutrition affects approximately 2.3 billion adults worldwide. Following 3 years of capacity building work in Kolkata, with assistance of local volunteers and organisations, we established an empowering nutrition education model in the form of a 'mobile teaching kitchen (MTK)' with the aim of creating culinary health educators from lay slum-dwelling women. AIMS: To evaluate the piloting of a novel MTK nutrition education platform and its effects on the participants, alongside data collection feasibility. METHODS: Over 6 months, marginalised (RG Kar and Chetla slums) women underwent nutrition training using the MTK supported by dietitians, doctors and volunteers. Preintervention and postintervention assessments of knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP), as well as anthropometric and clinical nutritional status of both the women and their children were recorded. The education was delivered by a 'See One, Do One, Teach One' approach with a final assessment of teaching delivery performed in the final session. RESULTS: Twelve women were trained in total, six from each slum. Statistically significant improvements were noted in sections of KAP, with improvements in nutrition knowledge (+4.8) and practices (+0.8). In addition, statistically significant positive changes were seen in 'understanding of healthy nutrition for their children' (p=0.02), 'sources of protein rich food' (p=0.02) and 'not skipping meals if a child is ill' (p≤0.001). CONCLUSION: The MTK as a public health intervention managed to educate, empower and upskill two groups of lay marginalised women into MTK Champions from the urban slums of Kolkata, India. Improvements in their nutrition KAP demonstrate just some of the effects of this programme. By the provision of healthy meals and nutritional messages, the MTK Champions are key drivers nudging improvements in nutrition and health related awareness with a ripple effect across the communities that they serve. There is potential to upscale and adapt this programme to other settings, or developing into a microenterprise model, that can help future MTK Champions earn a stable income

Coping practices and gender relations: Rohingya refugee forced migrations from Myanmar to India

Rohingya experiences of displacement and refuge are heavily gendered. Sexual and gender-based violence have been used as weapons against Rohingya women, men, girls and boys in Myanmar for decades. Trafficking and exploitation are rife on the flight out of the country, and host states such as India present their own gendered challenges to family survival and individual coping. In this paper, we examine how some of those violent and disruptive experiences have affected gender roles for individuals and families as they have fled Myanmar (often more than once) and sought refuge in India via Bangladesh. We present new insight into the dynamic subjectivity of Rohingya women as we show how, contrary to dominant depictions of passive victimhood, many have lead family migration across borders, taken up NGO/community leadership roles, or made the best ‘home’ possible within the limitations of the host context. This is because personal and family agency is sensitive to transitional opportunities and threats—i.e., gender norms of home and host contexts, interactions with host communities, and trust relations with NGOs, to name a few. Crucially, these social practices and experiences are not static or linear; they spa

Looking Through and Beyond Conflicts: Communal Violence and the Social Order in Hyderabad (India)

Communalism permeates the political, academic, media and everyday discourse in and about India. As a dominant interpretive framework, it expresses a particular politics of interfaith relations that normalises socio-political conflicts and violence intersecting with gender, class and caste relations. These intersections emerge in the experiences, practices and spaces of marginality and violence, revealing both the mechanisms of their normalisation in the context of communal violence and the experience of living within, through and despite it. Everyday life becomes the privileged context for reading communalism in light of a systematic reorganising of the gender-socio-economic governance, and the possibility to interrogate it. Based on an ethnographic study carried out in Hyderabad between 2009 and 2012, the paper reveals a politics of communal violence embedded in everyday social practices. It shows that the gender-socio-economic governance is not parallel to communalism but in fact constitutive of its logic and practices. The paper offers a perspective on how socio-political conflicts become actualised in a social order and how agency within such contexts unfolds as awareness of and action upon the space/possibility of their reconfiguration

Greenfield Development as Tabula Rasa. Rescaling, Speculation and Governance on India's Urban Frontier

International audienceGreenfield urban development can be seen as an enduring idiom of politics in India, with state initiative from precolonial times to the present day responsible for establishing iconic capital cities such as Jaipur, Kolkata, or Chandigarh. However, a renewed interest in building new cities, variously labelled “smart,” “green” or “integrated,” is now accompanied by an increasing tendency to instrumentalise the urban in pursuit of economic growth and a competitive drive to attract global financial flows. Situated at the intersection of several recent literatures from speculative urbanism to theorisations of rescaling and bypass, the papers in this special issue foreground the struggles over land that animate debates about these greenfield sites while looking beyond these concerns to question the urban futures they presage. Synthesising the insights from these papers, this essay flags critical issues for the politics of urban development and sketches pathways for future research

Understanding Self-Construction of Health among the Slum Dwellers of India : A Culture-Centered Approach

Disembarking from a traditional approach of narrow hazardous environmental and structural conditions in understanding urban slums' health problems and moving towards a new notion of what constitutes health for slum dwellers will open a new avenue to recognise whether and how health is being prioritised in disadvantaged settings. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews with a total of 67 men and 68 women from Kolkata slums and 62 men and 48 women from Bangalore slums, this study explored how knowledge, social realities, material and symbolic drivers of a place interweave in shaping slum-dwellers' patterned way of understanding health, and the ways health and illnesses are managed. The current study adds to the growing evidence that ordinary members of the urban slums can articulate critical linkages between their everyday sociocultural realities and health conditions, which can support the design and delivery of interventions to promote wellbeing. The concept of health is not confined to an abstract idea but manifested in slum-dwellers' sporadic practices of preventive and curative care as well as everyday living arrangements, where a complex arrangement of physical, psychological, financial, sociocultural and environmental dimensions condition their body and wellbeing

What drives the creation of nested markets? A qualitative case study of food markets in West Bengal, India

The ethics of ecological production, egalitarianism, and democratic control underpinning recent research directions in agri-environmental governance are common to many of the issues explored in the alternative economies literature. One way in which these ethics are put into practice in agri-environmental governance is through the concept of ‘nested markets’. Using qualitative methods of interviews and a focus group discussion, we examine newly constructed markets for food at different spatial scales in West Bengal, India. We find that multifunctional farmers and other actors along the supply chain started to construct and/or strengthen their own outlets and channels to reach consumers and to sell their products. Some of these markets build on long, historically deeply-rooted experiences, such as local periodic markets; others are relatively new constructions, making use of internet marketing platforms or messaging services and direct home delivery. Although they are market segments that are nested in the wider commodity markets for food, they have a different nature, different dynamics, a different redistribution of value added, and different relations between producers and consumers. Surprisingly, environmental issues were considered to be less important motivations than the creation of solidarity between producers and consumers. A deeper examination of these markets suggests new possible answers to the question of how to improve the sustainability of agricultural systems within an alternative economies framework

Smart as (un)democratic? The making of a smart city imaginary in Kolkata, India

‘Smart’ imaginaries have been enthusiastically embraced by urban planners and policymakers around the world. Indians are no exception. Between 2015–2018, following national government guidelines to use participatory and inclusive processes, many cities developed proposals for a smart city challenge. Successful proposals received financial and technical support from the national government. We examine the making of the smart city proposal submitted by New Town Kolkata (NTK). We ask how (un)democratic was the making of the proposal, along three aspects: distributive, participatory, and responsive. Based on an analysis of documents and interviews with policymakers and citizens, we find that NTK’s smart city imaginary largely failed to be distributive. It rarely accounted for the specific needs of poorer and vulnerable citizens. City officials invested considerable effort in using participatory techniques, but citizen participation was tightly controlled through top-down design and practice of the techniques. The latter often facilitated one-way flow of information from the city administration to the citizens. The proposal was responsive to some citizens’ voices, but only those belonging to the more affluent classes. A messy diversity of citizens’ voices was thus closed down, as the city officials filtered and cherry-picked citizens’ voices that were well-aligned with the official technocratic vision of ‘global’ smart urbanism. The paper shows how democracy can be put in the service of technocracy, within a rhetoric of citizen participation and social inclusion that embodies smart urbanism