Despite fifty years of commitment by our governments to so called development, more than half the people of South Asia today work harder and get less for their effort than ever before. More than 300 million of these are women who spent their entire waking hours in one drudge task after another. It is hard for the average city person to comprehend the misery that surrounds the lives of these fellow citizens of ours. A study by the Indian Social Institute has estimated that women in the Chattisgarh region of central India walk more than 4 kilometers a day to gather various products they need from the forest, up from 1.6 kilometers only 20 years ago. Life for our poor and particularly for the women is definitely not improving. Her prayer is no longer for a lighter burden, but for a stronger back.

Recent field observations by Development Alternatives in the Bundelkhand region of Central India show that an average woman in that region spends upto three, and in some cases four hours a day fetching water. Even when there is a pump right in the village collecting water takes more than one and a half hours, most of it standing in line, waiting. It is not uncommon, throughout the subcontinent, to see little girls not yet in their teens carrying headloads weighing a crippling 10, 12 and even 15 kilos. In many areas, they walk for four or five hours each day, covering upto 20 kilometers and facing all kinds of dangers on the way, ranging from deadly snakes and poisonous scorpions to rogue elephants and rapacious forest guards.

What little time that is left over after fetching water, gathering fuel and fodder, food preparation and cooking, taking care of husband and children goes into hard labour in the fields and odd jobs like feeding and washing the animals. Each day brings twice as much work as could humanly be expected from one frail, under nourished body, leading researchers to coin the term "the double day". Life for the village woman is truly busy, but it is also closed, dull and short. Custom and the exigencies of family life preordain a life with little leisure or fulfilment for most of the women on our subcontinent.

And then there is the simple matter of existence. For a large percentage of women in our country, life can only be described as a terminal disease. This may be true in one sense for all living beings, but it is a particularly appropriate description for the women living in poverty. Spending hours in the smoke filled kitchen destroys her lungs. Constant bending and carrying huge headloads of fuel and water distorts her spinal column. Malnutrition destroys her bones. Direct, blazing sunlight withers away her skin, sometimes causing cancer. Intestinal diseases nurtured by contaminated water eat away her insides. Anaemia from iron-deficient food debilitates her energy. Unwanted pregnancies and still births finally finish off her health.

How long can this go on?

Over the years, we have gradually learned that for any development process to be sustainable, it must be equitable, efficient, ecological – and empowering. The term empowerment, despite its impending nose-dive into the sea of meaningless jargon as it rapidly becomes the buzzword of the development and gender sets, is a valuable, highly integrative concept that brings together many of the desirable goals of social and economic development. It signifies activities that help people who are most marginalised in society – particularly women, but also the poor and the handicapped – to gain a reasonable degree of control over the decisions that affect their lives. A person becomes more empowered when he or she is able to participate effectively in family and community processes. To be empowered, one must have access to basic knowledge, health and social status. Successful routes to empowerment therefore include access to education, adequate nutrition and health care and information about one’s rights.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine, that in the increasingly materialized, commoditised, and monetised world of today, anyone can feel truly empowered without access to income or status that for the poor comes only with a job.

Raising incomes and creating sustainable livelihoods needs new kinds of technology, which make people, not machines, the masters. Moreover, as Development Alternatives has shown, it is possible to design technologies in such a manner that women do not get further marginalised in their communities. To achieve this, the most important criterion that comes through is that the innovation and delivery of sustainable technologies must be arranged so as to maximise their benefits for women.

Sustainable livelihoods create goods and services that are widely needed in any community. They give dignity and self-esteem to the worker. They create purchasing power, with it greater economic and social equity, especially for women and the underprivileged. In short, a sustainable livelihood is a remunerative, satisfying and meaningful job that enables each member of the community to help nurture and regenerate the resource base. Since women are at the front-line of resource management, it becomes imperative that our decision makers carefully involve them in the planning, execution and evaluation of all development programmes. Their knowledge of resources, as well as their own aspirations should form the basis of all projects designed to improve the conditions of the poor. It is the woman who largely manages the communities resources: land, water, energy sources, and of course the bounties of nature: the food crops, the domestic animals and the forests. Most of the common property resources of the community are in their care. Without their active participation no future can be secure for any community.

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