st August, the country’s parliament passed a historic Food Security Bill, to provide for a wide-scale expansion of India’s subsidized grain program. A clause in the bill requires that ration cards must bear the name of the “women head of the beneficiary family.”
The change gives women the psychological boost of being considered the head of a household. As Sakuntala Narasimhan writes in Women News Network, it also gives them much-needed control over the use of the card:
[32-year-old] Mohana’s husband, a daily wage earner, regularly pawns the family’s ration card to pay for liquor so his wife and children often go hungry until the card is redeemed (with money she earns by taking on additional work as a cleaning maid).
If the ration card were in her name, she could ensure that the family’s food needs took precedence over her husband’s weakness for stopping at the local arrack shop to buy liquor.
Given the traditions in India of women eating last (and least) after feeding the men and children first, this change to the grain subsidy system could be huge for women’s health and food security.
Currently, only those earning less than $28 a month quality as BPL (below poverty line). Under the Food Security Bill, 670 million citizens will qualify for the food program.
General elections in India are scheduled for early 2014. The ruling Congress Party, under Sonia Gandhi, introduced the Food Security Bill; with an eye on the country’s 350 million women, other politicians seem to be crafting measures to empower women.
Narasimhan points to an August 30 directive from a parliamentary committee under which all state governments must provide employees who are single women with positions that are “closest to their home towns or places of their choice.” The directive also says that “the needs of mothers with small children, the directive adds, have also to be addressed ‘with empathy’” and encourages flexible work hours. These are small changes, but women and mothers around the world know that such seemingly meager innovations can make a big difference.
Emphasizing that the discussion of women’s rights in India must move away from the “struggle against violence,” the authors of the “Invisible Women” report write that “changing attitudes may take time but the provision of infrastructure … reinforces the point that women belong in public space.”
Yes, they do and that space needs to be remade with their needs and lives in mind, to ensure that women can do just what one young woman was doing on a December night last year, going to the cinema with a friend in her country’s capital city.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
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