Hilary Clinton's Heroine

Ela Bhatt : Hilary Clinton’s heroine -
WASHINGTON: US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has hailed India's eminent social activist Ela Bhatt as one of her "heroines" for her pioneering work in empowering women. "I have a lot of heroes and heroines around the world," Clinton said on Thursday, adding that one of them is Ela Bhatt, who started an organization called the Self-Employed Women's Association (Sewa) in India many years ago.

"She was a very well educated woman who had the options available to those in her class with her intellectual ability, but she chose to devote her life to organizing the poorest of the poor, women who worked in fields, who sold vegetables, who were domestics, who struggled to eke out a living for themselves
and their families, women who were considered the last to eat, the least important," Clinton said while speaking very highly of Bhatt.
(Source:http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-06-23/us/32381949_1_ela-bhatt-heroines-hillary-clinton )
Ela Bhatt is founder of SEWA, India’s largest labor union which represents 1.2 million women in the informal sector from women stitching embroidery and making food products to day-laborers, artisans, waste collectors, street vendors and small farmers. She has received numerous international awards for her work and is a member of The Elders, a group of eminent global leaders who were brought together by Nelson Mandela in 2007.

The Gandhian Movement ; * Penning of the book on the Gandhi movement The grand history of Khadia was retraced when Ela Bhatt, founder of Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), released the book `Mahatma ki chaon mein' or 'Under the shadow of Mahatma' penned by her maternal grandfather late Dr Manidhar Shankarlal Vyas who was a freedom fighter and a revolutionary who had participated in the Dandi March.
-------------------------------------------------

A founding member of Women's World Banking, Ela Bhatt is also the founder of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), one of the most successful organizations for the economic empowerment of women in India. She also founded SEWA Cooperative Bank in 1974. In 1989, she was the first woman appointed to the Planning Commission in India.
Prior to this, she was a member of the Indian Parliament. Mrs. Bhatt's many awards include the Right Livelihood Award and the Ramon Magsasay Award and she was named to the Elders Project by Nelson Mandela in 2007. She has served on the WWB Board of Trustees since 1980, and was Chair from 1988 to 1998.

Ela Bhatt

"I realized that although eighty percent of women in India are economically active, they are outside the purview of legislation."
Ela's Story
Born in 1933 to a middle class, well-educated family, Ela Bhatt has spent her life fighting for the rights and welfare of India's 'invisible' workers. Her grandparents worked with Mahatma Gandhi in the non-violent struggle for Indian Independence from the British. Deeply influenced by Gandhi, Ela has followed his ideals all her life. She has pioneered the idea that people themselves, no matter how poor or uneducated, are able to solve their own problems if they organize together to do so. To help provide this, she founded SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association. Called "one of the best - -if not the best - - grassroots programmes for women on the planet," SEWA proved so successful that it has become a model for micro-finance programs in other parts of the world.
Ela started as a lawyer with the Textile Labour Association (TLA) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, a union founded by Gandhi, who had deep respect for India's textile producers. Working in the women's division, Ela soon found that women were doing many of the labor-intensive tasks needed in textile production, as well as in other fields of work. However, as workers, they were invisible. Out- raged, Ela said, "Personally, I don't think there can be any greater injustice to anybody in the world than to have one's work contribution negated… Who is the backbone of any economy in the country? It's the poor! Yet they are not recorded as workers in the national census. They are described as non-workers!"
Home-based workers are the least visible of all. In the textile industry, contractors give the women cloth pieces which are already cut out to form parts of a garment. The women sew the garments together at home and return them to the contractor. The women have to work fast and for long hours, because they are paid by the piece. Often, young daughters help with the sewing after school. The contractor would pay whatever he wished, often an extremely low rate of 4-5 rupees per day. The women, because they were unorganized, had no way to demand higher rates.
Other women workers in the informal sector also had very difficult working conditions and were often exploited.
These women included vegetable sellers, rag pickers, bidi rollers (a hand-rolled cigarette), incense makers, cleaners, laborers, cart pullers, and silk and cotton workers.
"I realized that although eighty percent of women in India are economically active, they are outside the purview of legislation." Ela recognized that these women needed the help that they could get only through organizing together as a large group. To meet that need, she founded SEWA in 1972 to organize for better pay and working conditions. SEWA, which today has 250,000 members, helped workers at the lowest level of society become empowered to take control of their lives.
It soon became apparent that women workers had a serious problem with money and banking. Even though many of the women worked twelve hours a day or more, they made little money, had no savings, and never had enough capital to improve their conditions. For example, a home- based textile assembler might have to pay high rent on the sewing machine she used. She never had enough money at one time to buy the machine. Even if a woman was able to get a little money together, the money often was not safe at home, where men felt entitled to whatever was in the
house.
If a women wanted to borrow money to further her business (for example, to buy extra vegetables to sell in the market), she would have to borrow from money lenders at outlandish rates, sometimes 50% per day.
Since women's wealth was often in the form of jewelry, they also got funds through pawning. Because they were largely illiterate, these women were unable to sign their names at a bank and were unfamiliar with banking routines. A male relative would have to sign for them, gaining access to the money. In addition, bankers, who had never dealt with illiterate low-income women, treated them badly.
SEWA had a meeting to which 2000 women came and told of their difficulties with the banks. Finally, someone said, "Let's start our own bank!" Others agreed, and the idea was underway. SEWA Bank was registered in 1974 with 4,000 members. When money had to be raised to register the bank, the women, saying, "We are poor, but we are so many!" raised the needed RS. 100,000 within six months. Ela says that the idea that illiterate women cannot be decision-makers in finance is an untrue middle-class
notion.
A major problem was that the women could not sign their names. How could they be identified at SEWA Bank? SEWA found a way that was so successful it is now used in banks throughout India. Each woman was photographed holding a slate with her bank account number on it. One copy of the photo was in her bank passbook, while another copy was kept at the bank. This definite identification meant that women could now have money in their own names: men were no longer part of the process.
When a woman joins SEWA Bank, the first step is saving. The woman must save an amount every week, no matter how small. Even if she makes only RS. 4, she is encouraged to save half a rupee. SEWA even provides a locked piggy bank for the purpose, and representatives from sewa come to the woman's home to take the savings to the bank.
After acquiring the habit of saving, a woman will be allowed to take out a loan. Designed to meet the needs of low-income women, the loans are small with a long payback period, up to 36 months. Ela pioneered the concept of micro-lending, the idea that very small amounts, as small as $5, may be all that is needed to make a difference.
Women used the loans for practical purposes: buying equipment they had formerly rented, expanding a business, installing indoor plumbing, and paying for children's education. Over 95% of the loans are repaid on time, a much higher repayment rate than for other banks. SEWA Bank also educates and assists the women through other services, such as day care, maternity protection, and job training.
SEWA Bank, which now has over us $3 million in assets, has been so successful that there are now branches in other parts of India, and men have even asked to be included. It is important to realize that all this has been accomplished without any outside financial help whatsoever. The women did it themselves.
Most important, the SEWA Bank model, through its concepts of micro-finance, has been used to empower poor women throughout the world. Towards this end, Ela joined with nine other women at the first UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975; these women shared the belief that the world's financial institutions must become accessible to low-income women. Incorporated in 1979, Women's World Banking now has 43 affiliates in 35 countries. Ela Bhatt has served as its chair since 1985.
The far-reaching effects of Ela Bhatt's work have been recognized internationally through many awards, including the Right Livelihood Award (the alternate Nobel Prize) for 'Changing the Human Environment' in Stockholm in 1984.
Formal Economy
In India today, only about 11% of workers hold regular jobs with formal employer- employee relationships. These jobs are documented and the workers are protected by whatever laws are available.
Informal Economy
Nearly 89% of India's workers are undocumented. Their work in the informal sector is usually not covered by legal protection that may be available to workers in formal sector jobs. They work either on their own, or as piece workers with a contractor or middleman, in relationships that depend on verbal agreement.
Home-based Work
Part of the informal economy, this work is done at home, usually by women. She gets raw materials from a contractor or middleman, assembles the finished product, and brings it to the middleman for payment. Often at the mercy of the contractor, she must accept whatever pay he is willing to give. This type of worker is the most invisible in the economy.
Macro-Finance
Works with the large amounts of money used by banks, governments, stock markets, corporations, and other large institutions.
Micro-Finance
Micro-finance works with the very small amounts of money actually used by low-income people. It is often the most appropriate way to implement social programs at the grassroots level.
Things to Do and Discuss
1 Imagine that you are a poor woman working in Gujarat, India. Construct a family, home, and job for yourself. You may want to consult a book or encyclopedia to get more information. What problems do you think you would have? How would you use a loan from SEWA Bank to improve the lives of yourself and your family?
2 How is women's work considered in your own country? In what ways is it similar or different from the situation in India? Do you think that changes such as SEWA provides would be useful in your country?
-------------------------------------------------

Ela R Bhatt
-------------------------------------------------

Extremely gentle and soft-spoken, yet firm and determined and widely recognized as pioneer in pushing for entrepreneurial forces in grassroots development leading to women empowerment - this is the practicing Gandhian economics and septuagenarian, Ela R Bhatt, popularly known as Elaben by members of Self Employed Women's Association or SEWA, which she founded in 1972. She helped the self-employed women to organize themselves. Its members include vegetable vendors, fisherwomen, bidi-rollers, weavers, and saltpan workers who were exploited for generations by middlemen.
SEWA empowered them to explore direct market linkages, removing middlemen from the chain. Next it propagated the concept of self-reliance by producing and marketing to other villages leading to self-sustained village economy. It has formed 102 cooperatives including milk and grain and a Rural Distribution Network called RUDI to help women link with other villages in a 100-km radius. Next came a cooperative bank called SEWA Bank in 1974 to help these women have access to banking services which otherwise were not available. Like a banyan tree the SEWA today has spread to countries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
-------------------------------------------------

Ela R Bhatt
-------------------------------------------------

Extremely gentle and soft-spoken, yet firm and determined and widely recognized as pioneer in pushing for entrepreneurial forces in grassroots development leading to women empowerment - this is the practicing Gandhian economics and septuagenarian, Ela R Bhatt, popularly known as Elaben by members of Self Employed Women's Association or SEWA, which she founded in 1972. She helped the self-employed women to organize themselves. Its members include vegetable vendors, fisherwomen, bidi-rollers, weavers, and saltpan workers who were exploited for generations by middlemen.
-------------------------------------------------

SEWA empowered them to explore direct market linkages, removing middlemen from the chain. Next it propagated the concept of self-reliance by producing and marketing to other villages leading to self-sustained village economy. It has formed 102 cooperatives including milk and grain and a Rural Distribution Network called RUDI to help women link with other villages in a 100-km radius. Next came a cooperative bank called SEWA Bank in 1974 to help these women have access to banking services which otherwise were not available. Like a banyan tree the SEWA today has spread to countries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
-------------------------------------------------

Ela Bhatt Of SEWA Awarded Indira Gandhi Prize For Promoting Peace :

New Delhi, 18 Feb (Tehelka Bureau):

Ela Bhatt is a name which has seen the transformation of close to 17 lakh people in the last four decades. As one of the founders of Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), she has promoted the cause of women relentlessly allowing millions of them to become independent and self reliant.

The impact of her work has been recognized consistently and it was lauded once again on Monday when she was honored by the President of India with the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development. This makes Bhatt only the third Indian in the history of the award to receive the prize constituted in the memory of the late Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi. The other Indian recipients are former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and father of green revolution MS Swaminathan.

Bhatt used the opportunity to re-examine the idea of peace and interpreted it as an instrument which disarms and renders war useless. Equating poverty with day-to-day violence, she found it to be no less destructive than war and said that its removal is essential for building peace.

Stressing on the need to address the “realities of our own countries rather than catching up with the western economic models”, Bhatt urged the people to follow a principle which ensures six basic necessities- food, shelter, clothing, primary education, primary healthcare and primary banking- are available within a 100 mile distance. “If these necessities are locally produced and consumed, we will have the growth of a new holistic economy,” she said.
-------------------------------------------------

The President praised her by calling the prize a “tribute to her unflinching zeal towards the betterment of women in society”

New Delhi, 18 Feb (Tehelka Bureau): Ela Bhatt is a name which has seen the transformation of close to 17 lakh people in the last four decades. As one of the founders of Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), she has promoted the cause of women relentlessly allowing millions of them to become independent and self reliant.

The impact of her work has been recognized consistently and it was lauded once again on Monday when she was honored by the President of India with the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development. This makes Bhatt only the third Indian in the history of the award to receive the prize constituted in the memory of the late Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi. The other Indian recipients are former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and father of green revolution MS Swaminathan.

Bhatt used the opportunity to re-examine the idea of peace and interpreted it as an instrument which disarms and renders war useless. Equating poverty with day-to-day violence, she found it to be no less destructive than war and said that its removal is essential for building peace.

Stressing on the need to address the “realities of our own countries rather than catching up with the western economic models”, Bhatt urged the people to follow a principle which ensures six basic necessities- food, shelter, clothing, primary education, primary healthcare and primary banking- are available within a 100 mile distance. “If these necessities are locally produced and consumed, we will have the growth of a new holistic economy,” she said
-------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------
Dr. Ela Bhatt, recipient of the University of Chicago's 2007 William Benton Medal for Distinguished Public Service, presented a public lecture on Novermber 27th in the Weymouth Kirkland Courtroom. Ela R. Bhatt is widely recognized as one of the world’s most remarkable pioneers and entrepreneurial forces in grassroots development. Known as the “gentle revolutionary” she has dedicated her life to improving the lives of India’s poorest and most oppressed women workers, with Gandhian thinking as her source of guidance. In 1972, Dr. Bhatt founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) – a trade union which now has more than 1,000,000 members. Founder Chair of the Cooperative Bank of SEWA, she is also founder and chair of Sa-Dhan (the All India Association of Micro Finance Institutions in India) and founder-chair of the Indian School of Micro-finance for Women. Dr. Bhatt was a Member of the Indian Parliament from 1986 to 1989, and subsequently a Member of the Indian Planning Commission. She founded and served as chair for Women’s World Banking, the International Alliance of Home-based Workers (HomeNet), and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing, Organizing (WIEGO). She also served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation for a decade. Dr. Bhatt has received several awards, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the Right Livelihood Award, the George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award, and the Légion d’honneur from France. She has also received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale, the University of Natal and other academic institutions. In 2007, Dr. Bhatt was named a member of The Elders, an international group of leaders whose goals include catalyzing peaceful resolutions to long-standing conflicts, articulating new approaches to global issues that are causing or may cause immense human suffering, and sharing wisdom by helping to connect voices all over the world. The Benton Medal The William Benton Medal for Distinguished Public Service is given to individuals who have rendered distinguished public service in the field of education. This field includes “not only teachers but also . . . everyone who contributes in a systematic way to shaping minds and disseminating knowledge.” Previous Benton Medal recipients include John Callaway, Katharine Graham, and Senator Paul Simon.
-------------------------------------------------
Source: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/node/1502
-------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------

The President of India Pranab Mukherjee on 18 February 2013 conferred 2011 Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development Award to Ela Ramesh Bhatt, a renowned Women social worker. The award was given away at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi.

Ela Bhatt was given away the award for life time achievements in women empowerment, promotion of grassroot level entrepreneurship as well as contribution towards promotion of equitable development and peace. Ela Bhatt has her organisation SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Association). President Pranab Mukherjee while giving away the award announced that SEWA was a vehicle of self employment and self reliance for the Indian women, while at the same time being synonymous with the rural inclusiveness.

Ela Bhatt

• Ela Bhatt is the founder of more than 1 million SEWAs in India.
• Since years, Ela Bhatt has been working for women empowerment and bringing women out of poverty through promotion of Self Help Groups.
• SEWA has empowered women with freedom as well as financial self- reliance
(Source: http://www.jagranjosh.com/current-affairs/ela-bhatt-conferred-2011-indira-gandhi-prize-for-peace-disarmament-and-development-award-1361254391-1)

-------------------------------------
It honours the hard work of the poor: Ela Bhatt
Tuesday, Feb 19, 2013, 16:44 IST | Place: Ahmedabad | Agency: DNA
Says Ela Bhatt on receiving Indira Gandhi peace prize.
Noted social worker Ela Ramesh Bhatt was on Monday conferred the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development by President Pranab Mukherjee.
After receiving the award, Elaben (80), founder of Self-Employed Women's Association (Sewa), said the prize is recognition of hard work by the all poor working women and their leadership worldwide, who hold peace, disarm violence and reduce poverty with their honest work. She said that award has given her the opportunity to explore what constitutes the peace.
“I have often stated that poverty is violence. This violence is by consensus of society that lets other human beings go without roti, kapada and makan. Poverty is not god given. It is a moral collapse of our society. Garibi hatao to me also meant, indeed, shanti banao. Garibi Hatao is a peace song,” said founder of Sewa which has 17 lakh members now.
She said that when Mahatma Gandhi talked about Swaraj, he talked about economic decentralisation. She urged people to ensure that six basic needs are met from resources within 100 miles.
-------------------------------------------------
“I call it the 100-mile principle. If food, shelter, clothing, primary education, primary healthcare and primary banking are locally produced and consumed, we will have the growth of a new holistic economy that the world will take note of,” she said. She insisted that catching up with the western economic models will turn us into incompetent followers, not leaders.
-------------------------------------------------
(Source: http://www.dnaindia.com/ahmedabad/1801728/report-it-honours-the-hard-work-of-the-poor-ela-bhatt
-------------------------------------------------

Ela Bhatt conferred prestigious Indira Gandhi Prize

Feb 18, 2013

Ela Bhatt, a well-known social worker, was honored for her life time achievements in empowering women and promoting grass root level entrepreneurship.
Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), was presented with the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for the year 2011 by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee at a glittering ceremony today.
Ela Bhatt was honoured for her life time achievements in empowering women, promoting grassroot level entrepreneurship and for her contribution towards promoting equitable development and peace.
Ela Bhatt is known globally for her work over decades (though officially only since 1972) that has created SEWA with a membership in excess of 1.3 million. She also founded the SEWA Cooperative Bank in 1974, which has an outreach of 3 million women -- simple figures that speak volumes of her dedicated efforts and leadership to successfully bring women out of poverty into a life of self-confidence and esteem.
Speaking on the ocassion President Pranab Mukherjee said Ela Bhat's orgainisation SEVA has today become synonymous with rural inclusiveness and a vehicle of self employment and self reliance for women. The President praised her work for bringing women out of poverty and empowering them with the freedom to choose and attaining financial self-reliance through the promotion of Self Help.
Congratulating her, the President said her life and work is reflective of the philosophy and ideals espoused by India's former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in whose memory the prize was instituted. The President said Ms Bhatt’s example would spur many more initiatives in our country and elsewhere, aimed at renewal of society and all-round development of people.
"If women are under represented in the productive efforts of our economy, it is not only injudicious but also detrimental to the cause of social progress," the president. "Due to the untiring efforts of Ms. Bhatt, SEWA has become an effective vehicle for promotion of self employment and self reliance amongst women. To realize these goals, the organization has been providing support services in the areas of savings and credit, health care, child care, legal aid, insurance, capacity building and communication. It has become a multi-dimensional entity - a labour collective, a co-operative and a women’s movement."
-------------------------------------------------
Speaking on the occassion, India's Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh said, "By saying that poverty is the moral failure of a society, Ela-ben throws down the gauntlet to society at large. Her own attempt to attack poverty by organizing poor women and helping them empower themselves economically is at once aimed at the twin evils of poverty and gender discrimination."
Ela Bhatt :
The ‘gentle revolutionary’; a pioneer in women’s empowerment and grassroots development, founder of the more than 1 million-strong Self-Employed Women’s Association in India.
There are risks in every action. Every success has the seed of some failure. But it doesn't matter. It is how you go about it. That is the real challenge."
Ela Bhatt has been a member of The Elders since the group was founded in 2007. Profoundly influenced by Gandhian thinking, she advocates local, grassroots solutions for those who are poor, oppressed or suffering the effects of violent conflict.
She joined her fellow Elders to encourage peaceful Palestinian protest and self-reliance during The Elders’ two delegations to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
One of India’s foremost women’s rights activists, Ela Bhatt welcomed the Elders to India in February 2012, where the group lent their support to young people in the state of Bihar campaigning to end child marriage in their own communities.

One of India’s foremost women’s rights activists, Ela Bhatt welcomed the Elders to India in February 2012, where the group lent their support to young people in the state of Bihar campaigning to end child marriage in their own communities.

“We are poor, but so many”
Ela Bhatt is one of the world’s most remarkable pioneers and entrepreneurial forces in grassroots development. Known as the ‘gentle revolutionary’, she has dedicated her life to improving the lives of India’s poorest and most oppressed women workers.
In 1972 she founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a trade union for women workers in India’s huge informal sector, who make up 94 per cent of the female labour force and yet have never enjoyed the same rights and security as those in formal employment. Today SEWA has more than 1.2 million members across nine Indian states.
“We may be poor, but we are so many. Why don’t we start a bank of our own? Our own women’s bank, where we are treated with the respect and service that we deserve.” – Chandaben, SEWA member
The following year, Ela Bhatt founded the Cooperative Bank of SEWA. The bank helps women to gain financial independence and raise their standing in their families and communities - and puts into practice the Gandhian principles of self-reliance and collective action.

Empowering women workers
Among the organisations Ela Bhatt has created and inspired, she founded and chairs: * Sa-Dhan (the All India Association of Micro Finance Institutions in India) * The Indian School of Micro-finance for Women * Women’s World Banking * The International Alliance of Home-based Workers (HomeNet) * Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing, Organizing (WIEGO) |
She has also served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation for more than ten years.
In recognition of her work to improve the status of women and the working poor in India and elsewhere, Ela Bhatt was awarded the first-ever Global Fairness Initiative Award, the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the Right Livelihood Award, the George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award, and the Légion d’honneur from France. She has also received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale and the University of Natal.

-------------------------------------------------

Women, work and peace

Ela Bhatt, 18 February 2013
“Poverty is day-to-day violence, no less destructive than war.”
Receiving the 2011 Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development, Ela Bhatt re-examines our idea of peace, arguing that equity, local economies and the empowerment of women through work are central to supporting economic freedoms, and therefore peace.
Honorable President of India, Honorable Shrimati Sonia Gandhi, Honorable Prime Minister of India, and distinguished dignitaries and friends:
Thank you for this singular honor. I humbly accept the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development on behalf of the self-employed women of SEWA. This year, SEWA is 40 years old; I turn 80. We are a sisterhood of 17 lakh [1.7 million]. Our journey is long and perhaps endless.

This prize has given honor to all working poor women and their leadership worldwide, who hold peace, disarm violence and reduce poverty with their honest work. And therefore, it gives me deep contentment to be here today. I still hope someday they will hold a central place in our economy.
This peace prize gives us an opportunity to re-examine our ideas of what constitutes peace. Certainly, absence of war is not peace. Peace is what keeps war away, but it is more than that; peace disarms and renders war useless. Peace is a condition enjoyed by a fair and fertile society. Peace is about restoring balance in society; only then is it lasting peace. In my view, restoration and reconstruction of a society are essential and key components of the peace process worldwide.
If we look carefully at our world, we find that where there is unfair distribution of resources, there is unrest. When people cannot enjoy the fruits of their labors fairly, when they are forced off their land and homestead and forest, we have the basis of an unjust society. Where there is violence and conflict, we invariably find poverty. And where there is poverty, we find anger and acute struggles for justice and equity. And we see governments resorting to repression for ensuring ‘law and order’.
I have often stated that poverty is violence. This violence is by consensus of society that lets other human beings go without roti and kapada and makan. Poverty is not God-given. It is a moral collapse of our society. Poverty strips a person of his or her humanity and takes away freedom. Poverty is day-to-day violence, no less destructive than war. Poverty is lack of peace and freedom. In fact, removing poverty is essentially building peace. I know I am not saying anything new. Garibi Hatao to me also meant indeed Shanti Banao. Garibi Hatao is a peace song.

In India, we are proud of our multicultural society. Bahudha is at the heart of what makes us who we are: social diversity, political diversity, religious diversity, biological diversity. But in our rush to modernise let us not forget one of our greatest assets: our economic diversity. In our markets, we have the street vendor, the cart seller, the kiosk owner, the shop owner, and the supermarket owner, all plying their trades at the same time. Let them cater to different strata of society, co-existing and competing in a natural, organic way. Let our planning include ample room for the millions of small entrepreneurs and self-employed, who cater to the widest strata of society, to flourish and grow. They are the agents of an economic development that reaches the grassroots; they weave the living web of social and economic relationships that will bind our nations together.

Gandhiji talked about swaraj; he talked about economic decentralization. I would urge us to ensure that six basic primary needs are met from resources within 100 miles around us. I call it the "100 mile principle". If food, shelter, clothing, primary education, primary healthcare and primary banking are locally produced and consumed, we will have the growth of a new holistic economy, which the world will sit up and take note of. And it is possible in and around India – in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Afghanistan – women have done it.

Catching up with western economic models will turn us into incompetent followers, not leaders. But if we address the realities of our own countries, we can create a development that makes us leaders of our destiny. Let me make clear, however, that the 100 mile principle is not a recipe for isolation. I am not asking at all that we go back but move forward with heightened awareness about how and where we spend our money and what our work is doing to us and those around us. In fact, technologies can help to share knowledge and ideas across countries.
However, we do need to get away from a world where people grow what they do not eat, and eat what they do not grow; where they have lost control over their basic production and daily consumption; where they have become part of a system whose outcomes are determined by people far away, in a manner not in their interest and outside their control. This awareness is already growing among the younger generation the world over. In India, we have a running start because our local economies are still alive. Let us give them the respect they deserve by investing in people who survive despite our neglect.
And where do we start? I have faith in women. Women have shown, if we care to observe, that disarmament in the end is not a treaty by two nations to render arms useless, though such treaties are much-needed in this world. In my experience, as I have seen within India and in other countries, women are the key to rebuilding a community. Why? Focus on women and you will find an ally who wants a stable community. She wants roots for her family. You get a worker, a provider, a caretaker, an educator, a networker, a forger of bonds. I consider thousands of poor working women’s participation and representation an integral part of the peace and development process. Women bring constructive, creative and sustainable solutions to the table.
Also, in my experience, productive work is the thread that weaves a society together. When you have work, you have an incentive to maintain a stable society. You cannot only see the future, but you can plan for the future. You can build assets and invest in the next generation. Life is no longer just about survival. Work builds peace because work gives people roots, as well as allowing them to flower; it builds communities and it gives meaning and dignity to one’s life. Work restores man’s relationships with himself, with fellow human beings, with the earth and the environment, and with the great spirit that created us all.
Being one of The Elders, I listen to Nelson Mandela, dear Madiba, telling us frequently that “money won’t create success, but the freedom to make it, will.”
True, in Gaza, the men and women said to me, "Without work we can neither forgive nor forget, because what have we to look forward to?" In a Sudanese camp, I heard refugees crying for work, not charity. After the earthquake in Kutch, when I visited the area, everywhere I went the women, who had lost everything, said to me, "Ben, have you brought work?"
By work, I do not mean sweatshops and cheap labour in factories that leave a person a slave to yet another kind of exploitation. Treating land and forests and people and even work as a commodity cannot build a fuller human being, nor a holistic society. Such work strips them of the multifunctional, multicultural character of work that fosters a dynamic and organic growth in society.
A woman who tends a small plot of land, grows vegetables, weaves cloth, and provides for the family and the market, while caring for the financial, social, educational and emotional needs of her family is multifunctional worker and the builder of a stable society. One who labours long hours at a factory where he has no control of his work or his skills, contributes one product to society whose work is ‘measured’ and therefore given greater credence by us, while her work is unaccounted and ignored. It is the GDP at the household level that matters. The use of word ‘domestic’ in GDP should not be overlooked. Peace and development cannot be measured in numbers.
I do hope that one day peace and development will shine on the face of our land and the people, and the world will enjoy the wisdom of my India.
Thank you very much.
Ela Bhatt delivered this speech upon accepting the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development, on 18 February 2013 in New Delhi.
-------------------------------------------------

Source: http://theelders.org/article/welcoming-my-fellow-elders-india
Welcoming my fellow Elders to India

“We hope to listen to girls affected by child marriage, their parents, their teachers and community leaders – and amplify their needs and concerns in our conversations with government, media and other influential people.”
Ela Bhatt is joined in India by her fellow Elders Desmond Tutu, Gro Brundtland and Mary Robinson at the start of a week-long visit focusing on the empowerment of girls and women.
I am very happy to be welcoming my friends Desmond Tutu, Gro Brundtland and Mary Robinson to India. This is the first time the Elders have travelled here as a group, and I hope that by the end of our visit to Delhi and Bihar, we will have become even “wiser”. Our aim is to listen and learn, not lecture. I also hope this is the beginning of a continued relationship with the people and leaders of India.
As some of you may already know, the Elders work together as independent global leaders, supporting peace-building and human rights. These issues are closely related in my view. Peace, human rights and human development go hand in hand, and the Millennium Development Goals – the international benchmarks for progress on poverty, health, education and other issues - are a very important tool. I strongly believe that peace is not a political issue, it’s a human one, and will only be achieved when everyone has the freedom to grow at their own pace and to fulfill their potential.
In India, the focus of our visit is to support Indian girls in particular to realize their full potential by drawing attention to the practice of child marriage. In this way, we hope we will also contribute towards India’s own development as a peaceful partner in the global family of nations.
In the developing world an estimated one in three girls is married before the age of 18. One in seven marries before 15. Around ten million girls a year are affected by child marriage and one third of them live in India. Child marriage is, however, a truly global practice. It occurs across all major religions and regions, from West and East Africa to South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and communities in Europe and the United States.
There are many reasons why child marriage happens, but we now recognize that marrying later, delaying pregnancy and continuing girls’ education, providing them adequate skills and financial literacy, are all important ways to support development and build a more peaceful world.
As I mentioned, the Elders are not here to lecture or prescribe. Nevertheless as home to a significant proportion of the world’s child brides, addressing this issue in India is very important on the global scale. What we hope to do is to listen to girls affected by child marriage, their parents, their teachers and community leaders – and amplify their needs and concerns in our conversations with government, media and other influential people.
I am very sympathetic to the difficult decisions that families must make here in India. Even if they want their daughters to be educated, there are often no schools nearby, especially outside the big towns and cities. Physical security is a real concern if girls have to travel long distances or stay in dormitories away from home.
In India, family and community are also central to most people’s security – both physical and financial. Marriages are not just between individuals, but weave together families and communities in mutually supportive networks. This makes marriage complex and important to social cohesion.
Like everywhere in India, we are seeing change. I have seen differences in age of marriage from my mother’s generation to my own, and my daughters’. But it is far too slow.
We hope that the Elders’ contribution will help to create an enabling environment where everyone works together – government, young people, media, NGOs, and businesses too – so that girls can become equal members of the family, not second class members, and can truly fulfil their potential.
We look forward to sharing our thoughts along the way, and hope that you will join the conversation too.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peace by practice: Mandela Day 2011
Ahead of Mandela Day 2011, Ela Bhatt asks how we can live up to Nelson Mandela's example and discusses the power of "thinking local" to change our communities and create a better world.
To me, Nelson Mandela is a supreme symbol of freedom’s struggle. Next week, on 18 July, he will celebrate his 93rd birthday, a daythat around the world people now recognise as ‘Mandela Day’.
Let us take this opportunityto reflect on the life of a man we have come to know and respect as a great leader, one who sacrificed his own freedom for the freedom of his people. How best do we honour his achievements? What can we do to live up to Madiba’s example?
Looking for a solution
It is often said that the problems facing our world are too overwhelming or intractable - that you find endless conflict, injustice and poverty.
I agree that if you want to fixthe world’s problems, you have a mightytask. In my own country, India, the scale of the poverty we see is enough to break your heart. After decades of independence, freedom has still not come to everycitizen – discrimination has taken new forms, and the poorest of the poor live on the margins, the invisible engine of our so-called ‘Tiger economy’.
When we see such suffering, it is natural to wish to solve everything at once. We turn to our governments for a solution, and feel frustrated when theyfail to act. But I have never been one to argue that governments have all the answers.
Change is up to us
Our greatest source of strength is right under our noses; the families, work-places and communities that give us strong foundations, on which equal societies are built.
Thinking local, we can turn power upside down. In my work with Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), I have seen some of the poorest, most vulnerable women transform their lives and the communities theylive in. From being home-based workers, landless labourers or illiterate food vendors they have claimed their rights and have become the owners of their own resources, the beneficiaries of their own land. They meet resistance from the authorities at everystage but theystand firm, together, saying
“We are poor, but so many!”
I believe strongly that to bring widespread change, we must first make that change ourselves. Another great teacher, Mahatma Gandhi, imagined this as ripples in water, small circles of change that grow ever wider. Our actions have an impact we may never even see.
Peace by practice
Rather than find yourself immobilised bythe scale of the world’s problems, look around you. Even when a problem is right under your nose, it is easyto ignore it – we curse fate, blame tradition or say“it’s God’s will.”
But you will not have to search far before you find people who are hungry, lonely, downtrodden, persecuted – sometimes we just need a reason to reach out to them.
When Nelson Mandela founded The Elders, he invoked the idea of ubuntu: that we are human onlythrough the humanity of others. What he describes is more than charity, it is a certain outlook or way of life. Byserving others, we actuallyfulfil our own humanity – these actions are full of faith, a form of prayer.
This Mandela Day – a dayfor personal, local action – let us spend our energies serving our own communities to honour the 67 years Nelson Mandela dedicated to fighting for a better world.
(Source :
-------------------------------------------------

Harvard varsity to honour Ela Bhatt

(Source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-03-14/ahmedabad/28687384_1_ela-bhatt-sewa-honour )

BOSTON: The prestigious Harvard University will honor Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), for her "life and work" that has had a "significant impact on society" .
Bhatt (77), whose trade union has helped over a million women in India gain access to opportunities for themselves and their families, will be awarded the Radcliffe Institute Medal by Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

She would be presented the medal, awarded annually to individuals who have substantially and positively influenced society, on Radcliffe Day on May 27. Some of the illustrious past winners include Toni Morrison in 2007, Margaret Atwood in 2003, Billie Jean King in 2002 and Alice Walker in 1992.
"The Radcliffe Institute is proud to honor her this year, in which gender in the developing world is one of its dominant themes," the Institute said.
Recipient of several prestigious awards, Ela Bhatt founded SEWA in 1972. Conceived as a women's trade union, SEWA has grown into an NGO that offers micro-lending , health and life insurance and child care — all overseen by more than a hundred women-run cooperatives.
In January 2010, SEWA membership had reached 1.2 million.
Bhatt has been recognised for her long battle for social justice. In November last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had honoured Bhatt with the Global Fairness Initiative Award for helping move more than a million poor women in India to a position of dignity and independence.
Radcliffe Day is the Institute's annual celebration of women, as well as the alumnae and fellows of Radcliffe College and the Radcliffe Institute.
It is traditionally held on the day after Harvard's commencement.
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is a scholarly community where individuals pursue advanced work across a wide range of academic disciplines, professions and creative arts. Within this broad purpose , the institute sustains a continuing commitment to the study of women, gender and the society.
-------------------------------------------------

An exhibition on Ahmadabad’s forgotten heroine
TNN Nov 17, 2012, 06.44AM IST

AHMEDABAD: She was respected by lakhs of textile workers and the poor - Anasuya Sarabhai(1885-1972), fondly known as 'Motaben', holds a unique place in the history of the country. She is best remembered for joining hands with Mahatma Gandhi in leading the historic strike of mill workers in Ahmedabad, which eventually led to the founding of the country's first Textile Labour Association (TLA), in 1920.

A 13-day exhibition, starting on Saturday is being held in the city, chronicling Motaben's life. It also marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of Sewa (Self-employed Women's Association) as well as the 127th birthday of Anasuya Sarabhai. "Her reputation among mill workers, and the love and trust they showed in her leadership, were key to Gandhiji's eventual success," says Somanth Bhatt, who conjured up rare pictures of Anasuya for an exhibition at Shantisadan on Mirzapur Road in the walled city.

"Anasuyaben's thoughts and spirit nurtured Gandhi's ideologies. This is the first time a labour organization is getting involved in an exhibition for a labour leader, Motaben," says founder of Sewa, Ela Bhatt, who first worked with Motaben in 1955. Shantisadan was where Ansuyaben lived and founded the labour movement. "This is a rare oppurtunity to exhibit history in the place where it occured. The unique thing about this exhibition is that it is presented in a way that speaks about Anasuyaben in her own words and photographs," says Bhatt.
She further adds, "Many would not know this but Motaben was the force behind the major labour laws of our country. In my opinion, Motaben and her contribution to the reedom struggle and labour movement should become part of school textbooks."
-------------------------------------------------

Ela Bhat
(Source : http://www.tolerance.org/activity/ela-bhat)

"I realized that although eighty percent of women in India are economically active, they are outside the purview of legislation."

Ela's Story
Born in 1933 to a middle class, well-educated family, Ela Bhatt has spent her life fighting for the rights and welfare of India's 'invisible' workers. Her grandparents worked with Mahatma Gandhi in the non-violent struggle for Indian Independence from the British. Deeply influenced by Gandhi, Ela has followed his ideals all her life. She has pioneered the idea that people themselves, no matter how poor or uneducated, are able to solve their own problems if they organize together to do so. To help provide this, she founded SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association. Called "one of the best - -if not the best - - grassroots programmes for women on the planet," SEWA proved so successful that it has become a model for micro-finance programs in other parts of the world.
Ela started as a lawyer with the Textile Labour Association (TLA) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, a union founded by Gandhi, who had deep respect for India's textile producers. Working in the women's division, Ela soon found that women were doing many of the labor-intensive tasks needed in textile production, as well as in other fields of work. However, as workers, they were invisible. Out- raged, Ela said, "Personally, I don't think there can be any greater injustice to anybody in the world than to have one's work contribution negated… Who is the backbone of any economy in the country? It's the poor! Yet they are not recorded as workers in the national census. They are described as non-workers!"
Home-based workers are the least visible of all. In the textile industry, contractors give the women cloth pieces which are already cut out to form parts of a garment. The women sew the garments together at home and return them to the contractor. The women have to work fast and for long hours, because they are paid by the piece. Often, young daughters help with the sewing after school. The contractor would pay whatever he wished, often an extremely low rate of 4-5 rupees per day. The women, because they were unorganized, had no way to demand higher rates.
Other women workers in the informal sector also had very difficult working conditions and were often exploited. These women included vegetable sellers, rag pickers, bidi rollers (a hand-rolled cigarette), incense makers, cleaners, laborers, cart pullers, and silk and cotton workers.
"I realized that although eighty percent of women in India are economically active, they are outside the purview of legislation." Ela recognized that these women needed the help that they could get only through organizing together as a large group. To meet that need, she founded SEWA in 1972 to organize for better pay and working conditions. SEWA, which today has 250,000 members, helped workers at the lowest level of society become empowered to take control of their lives.
It soon became apparent that women workers had a serious problem with money and banking. Even though many of the women worked twelve hours a day or more, they made little money, had no savings, and never had enough capital to improve their conditions.
For example, a home- based textile assembler might have to pay high rent on the sewing machine she used. She never had enough money at one time to buy the machine. Even if a woman was able to get a little money together, the money often was not safe at home, where men felt entitled to whatever was in the house.
If a women wanted to borrow money to further her business (for example, to buy extra vegetables to sell in the market), she would have to borrow from money lenders at outlandish rates, sometimes 50% per day. Since women's wealth was often in the form of jewelry, they also got funds through pawning. Because they were largely illiterate, these women were unable to sign their names at a bank and were unfamiliar with banking routines. A male relative would have to sign for them, gaining access to the money. In addition, bankers, who had never dealt with illiterate low-income women, treated them badly.
SEWA had a meeting to which 2000 women came and told of their difficulties with the banks. Finally, someone said, "Let's start our own bank!" Others agreed, and the idea was underway. SEWA Bank was registered in 1974 with 4,000 members. When money had to be raised to register the bank, the women, saying, "We are poor, but we are so many!" raised the needed RS. 100,000 within six months. Ela says that the idea that illiterate women cannot be decision-makers in finance is an untrue middle-class notion.
A major problem was that the women could not sign their names. How could they be identified at SEWA Bank? SEWA found a way that was so successful it is now used in banks throughout India. Each woman was photographed holding a slate with her bank account number on it. One copy of the photo was in her bank passbook, while another copy was kept at the bank. This definite identification meant that women could now have money in their own names: men were no longer part of the process.
When a woman joins SEWA Bank, the first step is saving. The woman must save an amount every week, no matter how small. Even if she makes only RS. 4, she is encouraged to save half a rupee. SEWA even provides a locked piggy bank for the purpose, and representatives from sewa come to the woman's home to take the savings to the bank.
After acquiring the habit of saving, a woman will be allowed to take out a loan. Designed to meet the needs of low-income women, the loans are small with a long payback period, up to 36 months. Ela pioneered the concept of micro-lending, the idea that very small amounts, as small as $5, may be all that is needed to make a difference.
Women used the loans for practical purposes: buying equipment they had formerly rented, expanding a business, installing indoor plumbing, and paying for children's education. Over 95% of the loans are repaid on time, a much higher repayment rate than for other banks. SEWA Bank also educates and assists the women through other services, such as day care, maternity protection, and job training.
SEWA Bank, which now has over us $3 million in assets, has been so successful that there are now branches in other parts of India, and men have even asked to be included. It is important to realize that all this has been accomplished without any outside financial help whatsoever. The women did it themselves.
Most important, the SEWA Bank model, through its concepts of micro-finance, has been used to empower poor women throughout the world. Towards this end, Ela joined with nine other women at the first UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975; these women shared the belief that the world's financial institutions must become accessible to low-income women. Incorporated in 1979, Women's World Banking now has 43 affiliates in 35 countries. Ela Bhatt has served as its chair since 1985.
The far-reaching effects of Ela Bhatt's work have been recognized internationally through many awards, including the Right Livelihood Award (the alternate Nobel Prize) for 'Changing the Human Environment' in Stockholm in 1984.
Formal Economy
In India today, only about 11% of workers hold regular jobs with formal employer- employee relationships. These jobs are documented and the workers are protected by whatever laws are available.
Informal Economy
Nearly 89% of India's workers are undocumented. Their work in the informal sector is usually not covered by legal protection that may be available to workers in formal sector jobs. They work either on their own, or as piece workers with a contractor or middleman, in relationships that depend on verbal agreement.
Home-based Work
Part of the informal economy, this work is done at home, usually by women. She gets raw materials from a contractor or middleman, assembles the finished product, and brings it to the middleman for payment. Often at the mercy of the contractor, she must accept whatever pay he is willing to give. This type of worker is the most invisible in the economy.
Macro-Finance
Works with the large amounts of money used by banks, governments, stock markets, corporations, and other large institutions.
Micro-Finance
Micro-finance works with the very small amounts of money actually used by low-income people. It is often the most appropriate way to implement social programs at the grassroots level.
Things to Do and Discuss
1 Imagine that you are a poor woman working in Gujarat, India. Construct a family, home, and job for yourself. You may want to consult a book or encyclopedia to get more information. What problems do you think you would have? How would you use a loan from SEWA Bank to improve the lives of yourself and your family?
2 How is women's work considered in your own country? In what ways is it similar or different from the situation in India? Do you think that changes such as SEWA provides would be useful in your country?
-------------------------------------------------

Interview with Ela Bhatt
Founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA)

A good combination of struggle and constructive work
Create, as a strategy, alternative economic organizations

Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

|
Ela Bhatt. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | |
Self-employed vegetable vendors in Ahmedabad. Click to see a series of photos. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. |
Ela Bhatt is the founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association(SEWA) and was SEWA’s first general-secretary. Based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, SEWA is the largest single trade union in the country with a membership of 687,000 women. SEWA’s members are vegetable and garment vendors, in-home seamstresses, head-loaders, bidi rollers, paper pickers, construction workers, incense stick makers, and agricultural workers. They come from India's "unorganized sector" and organize for their just dues and rights. 96% of all women workers in India are in this sector. Among their achievements is the SEWA Bank whose capital is made up entirely of their own contributions. The SEWA Bank was founded in 1974 by 4,000 women each contributing ten rupees. This interview was conducted August 31, 2003 by Nic Paget-Clarke for In Motion Magazine in Ahmedabad. Also see interview with Jayshree Vyas - Managing Director of SEWA Bank. * The Independence Struggle * Self-employed laborers * A leading role in the women’s movement * You have to be for something * In Gandhi’s thinking * Civil disobedience and sit-in strikes * Satyagraha and street vendors * Face-to-face talk * Alternative economic organizations * Cooperatives and trade unions * Full employment and self-reliance – social change * The diversity of our society * Literacy education * Democratic values * To serve * Changes in the garment industry * Globalization: the construction industry * Embroidery and migration * Only because we had an organization * The interests of the local producers * Using the technology * Changing the balance of power
The Independence Struggle
In Motion Magazine: What made you think you needed to start the organization SEWA?
Ela Bhatt: I’m a product of the later years of the freedom movement, the independence movement of my country. As we were studying in school and then in college our teachers and everybody around was talking about independence. In the family, also, there was the atmosphere of the independence struggle. My own grandfather, my mother’s father, was in the Salt March. He was in jail. My mother’s two brothers were in jail. (Editor: begun March 12, 1930, the Salt March led by Mohandas (Mahatma) K. Gandhi was a 24-day march from his ashram in Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea to make salt and protest the British ban of an Indian’s right to make salt.).
When I was studying in college, our teachers asked us to go the villages and live with the villagers. Mainly against injustice, against poverty. We never had to question how to do it because Gandhiji had shown the way -- how to go about it and what kind of discipline you have to follow. There I met my husband (Ramesh Bhat) who was a student leader. I got married and I came to the same kind of family.
That is what raised the consciousness for me. I am a product of those days.
Self-employed laborers
Next, as soon as I finished my law (studies) I joined the Textile Laborers Association, which was started by Gandhiji in 1917. I was working for textile workers.
It was a union of the textile workers -- that is formal-sector labor. But, slowly, very gradually, there was a consciousness growing within me that there are so many other kinds of economic activities being done outside the formal sector, where there is no specific employer/employee relationship. What about them? I became more and more confirmed that if we talk of a labor movement worth its name in my country then it should include these workers who are outside the formal sector. I started calling them self-employed but economists and others call them the informal sector.
Most of the production of goods and services is done by the self-employed. In 1972, they were 89% of the workforce, the active working population in the country. Today that percentage has grown to 96%. Their contribution to the national income is very significant but they are outside the purview of the labor legislation. They are outside the purview of rightful access to social security, access to financial services, welfare programs.
Of course, after three decades, times have changed and slowly they have become more and more visible, but their political visibility is still not that powerful.
A leading role in the women’s movement | | | | | | A neighborhood SEWA representative. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | | | | | | | |
And the other thing that I realized was that when we talk of women and the women’s movement -- who are the women of India? They are rural, poor, illiterate or semi-literate, and economically very active. The (self-employed women workers) are 80% of the women of the country. It is these women who should be playing a leading role in the women’s movement.
These two things were getting more and more clear and confirmed in my mind. It is still the same. It has stayed with me to show me the direction.
You have to be for something
In ’72, we started organizing, unionizing the self-employed workers – women. And it took so many years to get ready for that stage.
It was not so easy because the registrar of trade unions said, “How can you call it a trade union? Who is the employer? Against whom are you going to fight?” I argued that the purpose of a union is not only to fight, or to be against somebody, you also have to be for something. And that was for changing so many laws and policies. Women may not be able to pinpoint an employer but we have to fight against certain systems. Like the contract system. Like that whole range of middlemen, of contractors, and subcontractors, and sub-sub-contractors. That is something that is an exploitative system.
Or with the public distribution system. Or with the marketplace. Or with the police – the police and the urban development policies who see street vendors as illegal. What we were questioning was, “What is illegal about street vending?” and therefore treating vendors like criminals, or like dirt.
We have to fight on so many levels. Contractors, police -- one can see them directly. The workers can see them directly, those who are harassing them or exploiting them. But also there is the system which supports them -- government agencies, government laws and regulations, courts. You also have to fight at that level.
And then there is still another level. At the national level and international level, there are certain perceptions about certain allocations of resources that you have to fight.
From the beginning, I had realized that when you organize at the grassroots you have to have two-way communication. Whatever is happening at the macro level has to percolate down. Whatever is happening at the grassroots has to be conveyed to the concerned agencies at the national level and the international level.
In Gandhi’s thinking | | | | | | Mahatma Gandhi's workroom in the Harijan Ashram by the Sabarmati River, Ahmedabad,. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | | | | | | | |
In Motion Magazine: You see SEWA as growing from Gandhi’s movement and philosophy. Are there specific aspects of that that you connect with?
Ela Bhatt: In Gandhi’s thinking, in his design of development, the human being is in the center. He talks about human values. It may be your personal life or public life, political life, economical, the life of the nation, of the society, or at a global level – but for him certain values, human values, were central. And they were non-negotiable. His values are truth, peace, nonviolence.
Also, in this change he put women as the leaders. He said that women are natural leaders in our fight for social justice where love and peace, nonviolence, are the chief weapons of the fight.
In my experience, I have seen that it is the women who have brought the change. For example, we have been working in the desert area for the last few years, and it is the women who have been able to change the local ecology, regenerate the local ecology. It is the local women who have stopped up to 80% of the forced migration. Women have that capacity for social change by coming together and working on a peaceful basis. I have a great faith in that and I have seen in practice that it is possible.
Civil disobedience and sit-in strikes
In Motion Magazine: Did you ever use civil disobedience tactics in your struggles?
Ela Bhatt: Yes, often we have to resort to that. Also, we have gone on strike as the last weapon, the last tool. We have sit-in strikes. We have satyagraha (editor: insistence on truth – nonviolent resistance).
In Motion Magazine: Could you give an example?
Ela Bhatt: Home-based workers, garment workers, bidi workers -- we have gone for demanding a higher wage rate, very often. We have had campaigns demanding for including garment stitching on the schedule of the Minimum Wage Act. Then for housing -- the bidi workers’ campaign for housing -- we often had to sit in front of the Urban Development Ministry.
Satyagraha and street vendors
In Motion Magazine: How many people would be involved?
Ela Bhatt: It depends. The number is no problem. I will tell you of a strike.
Some time back we had a satyagraha of street vendors. We have a downtown market were the women and men sit with baskets of vegetables, fruits, and utility items. The market runs from the beginning of the day until late night and they are all our members, the women.
The municipal corporation wanted to drive them out. We said that we have been here for the last three generations. It is our natural right to be here. Historically, we have been here. And it is true, they are the third or fourth generation that has been sitting there. But in the meantime, many new buildings have come up. And the shops have come up. And these vendors have literally been thrown to the street. They were being removed because they wanted to make a space for a parking lot.
So, where was this taken? The police clamped on a curfew – a five days, six days curfew. The vendors started starving. They had nothing to fall back on.
In the meantime, we had tried everything to explain our situation to the municipal corporation, to the police, everybody. But they didn’t listen to us. So, we said, in the most Gandhian way, that, “From tomorrow, 8 o’clock morning, we are going to sit here. Even if you don’t allow that, we are going to sit here.” | | | | | | Police in the market place. Ahmedabad. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | | | | | | | |
Already two policemen were standing there, early in the morning when we arrived and, of course, we had certain tactics, we started doing business. The police had a long argument with me and I kept them engaged in argument so when the women were ready they could bring their baskets. And as soon as the baskets were there the customers were ready to buy and the market started. The police didn’t know what to do. At about ten o’clock, they just withdrew and said, “You do whatever you want to do, but we are here”.
For about three days it went on like this. It was such good business because the vendors, they didn’t have to pay any fine to any inspector, or to the police -- fine or bribe, whatever you say. And in those three days, they didn’t have to have any stick beaten to them or their stuff thrown out on the ground. We managed ourselves. I was acting like a traffic police superintendent, managing the traffic.
In Motion Magazine: What year was that?
Ela Bhatt: ’89.
And court cases, Supreme Court cases, high court cases – ninety-eight cases are now pending in the courts. We take the legal recourse in the court, also.
Face-to-face talk
But the base is negotiations. My experience and my colleagues’ experience has been that by going to the court, in the case of street vendors, yes, we achieved quite a lot, but in the case of home-based workers, piece-rate workers, you win the case but then the workers lose their job. The court may give an order to reinstate them, but the employers, I mean these are small employers who don’t forget. They don’t want such workers back again. While most of the cases were successful -- to raise the wage rate or to reinstate them -- the dispute was dealt with by negotiations, with face-to-face talk.
Alternative economic organizations
In Motion Magazine: So that they don’t lose their jobs?
Ela Bhatt: Yes, that’s very important because in this country with all the unorganized sector labor, which is so much in surplus, there is always cheaper and more docile labor available. And these are women. It’s easy for them to suppress them.
Also, the other strategy that we have, in rural areas particularly, you have to create, as a strategy, alternative economic organizations. You can’t go by typical trade union style. Even though agricultural workers are insured a minimum wage per day, a certain wage, with India’s overflowing labor supply there’s hardly any bargaining power in the hands of the laborer.
Cooperatives and trade unions
You produce and sell in the market and when there is a balance of your own production unit, which is a cooperative, and you have a trade union demanding rights -- that joint action of union and cooperative is a good combination of struggle and constructive work to be able to obtain some bargaining power, to come in a bargaining position. That has been our experience all throughout.
(For example) in rural areas -- these are agricultural laborers, landless -- they work for a few months of the year then they hardly have any work. (But when we found out that) their fathers, and their fathers, were weavers or potters we tried to revive those trades and formed a cooperative. And also, we had them go through a financial services bank to own cattle, so then they have some milk.
In short, when there is more than one source of income, not only farm labor but also home-based production, something happening by way of craft, home-based, or agro-processing, whatever, and then thirdly dairy, when there is at least three sources of income, then they can with some comfortsurvive the year round. | | | | | | Inside the SEWA Bank. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | | | | | | | |
They have some bargaining power and they have some choice as to whether all the family members should go for farm labor or two of them can stay for that home-based production work. They have some strength to demand a higher wage.
Also, when we have organized many villages around, then the employer or the landlord cannot easily recruit labor from other villages because they are also part of SEWA.
Full employment and self-reliance – social change
In Motion Magazine: What are the basic principles of SEWA?
Ela Bhatt: Our basic goals are full employment and self-reliance. Our own definition of full employment is full employment at the household level, not at the macro level. Such employment ensures full security -- income security and social security. In social security, at least healthcare, childcare, shelter, and insurance. SEWA has all these -- social security, our bank, the union, and the cooperative.
Self-reliance is self-sufficiency financially, particularly I’m talking about their cooperatives, their unions. And then taking your own decisions so you are not just beneficiaries or users of the program but you are also manager and owner of the program. You decide and you manage in taking decisions, in managing your own affairs. You are self-sufficient. That is, in very specific terms, what we mean by self-reliance.
The general philosophy is that of social change. The basic thing is against poverty. Poverty is a great disease and the country, SEWA, tries to go forward but poverty pulls it back all the time. There cannot be any excuse for not removing poverty. The priorities have to change. The resource allocations have to change. Policies have to change.
The first priority is poverty removal and the second is maintaining the diversity, the diversity of our society.
The diversity of our society
In Motion Magazine: What does that mean, specifically?
Ela Bhatt: When different castes, different communities unite in SEWA or in a cooperative or in a union at the same time, they are able to maintain their own freedom to practice their own faith and their own culture. We don’t encourage total uniformity – though it’s easy.
Literacy education
In Motion Magazine: Do you do anything specifically related to education?
Ela Bhatt: Education, if you mean by it literacy, then literacy has come at a later stage, only since five years back, because whenever we had consulted our members it was not on their priority list. | | | | | | Krishna Dave and Pallavi Panchal conduct a SEWA financial training. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | | | | | | | |
To be able to understand financial management, savings, credit, money management, union laws, their own power to vote, all that was being done but literacy was missing. I, like any other middle-class woman, I was very keen from the beginning that, “Let there be education. Let them be literate and the exploitation will be over.” But it didn’t happen until the last five years.
It was at their insistence that we started the literacy program. They have produced their own literature, in consultation with the new literates, and it’s going wonderfully well.
We started with two districts, and now it is four districts. Now all the districts are demanding literacy education so we are planning, in a big way, a literacy program.
Even old women, 80-year-old women, they come to the class. All over I have been observing women illiterates are very keen to learn. This 80-year-old woman, I asked her, “Why do you want to learn at this age?” and she said, “So that I can write ‘Ram’.” – God’s name. And her husband, he said that, “At night from her bed, you know what she does, she dips her finger in the water and on the wall she writes ‘Ram’. That’s how she practices.” I mean to say that the motivation is very high.
Democratic values
In Motion Magazine: Is there a connection between democracy and economic involvement on this level?
Ela Bhatt: Values are most important. Democratic values have to be instilled from childhood and the child sees at an early stage in life in every situation in society, in politics, in public life, in home life, what democratic values are being practiced. Whether you have money or not is not so much important. They are poor so they need enough to eat. They need to earn enough to eat and send the children to school, the basic needs. But just having more income does not make them democratic or make then concerned, feel concerned, about other people’s situations. You have to come together in an organized way in an organization which works democratically and on certain values.
To serve
In Motion Magazine: And SEWA has those values?
Ela Bhatt: Yes. Transparency. Never resort to any violence. Equality. Communal harmony.
What does SEWA mean? “Sewa” means “to serve”. It’s a very pious word -- to serve others. The definition of “leader” in SEWA is “one who helps make others lead is a leader.” And that is why every three years we have elections, in a very systematic way. That is why we change leadership. And even in our unions when we fight with employers we never resort to anything that is a lie, untruth -- even if our members have made mistakes. Suppose a member has made a theft of a raw material or something, then we convince her to give it back. That way we are very particular.
Look at the bank. If repayment has not come we record it that way. We don’t re-schedule the balance sheet so that you can show that you have 100 percent repayment, the way some make entries in such a way, and reschedule the loan account so that it shows 100 percent repayment. We never do that. It is no use because why should we do that? We are not merchant salt traders. We are not bankers, per se. We are in there for social change and in building the society, armed strong with human values.
With more money or less money -- what character? It all depends upon character building and practicing democratic values. (At the national level), just to have, every five years, elections and to have your elected representatives sitting in the parliament or in the legislative assembly does not mean democracy. They behave in such an autocratic way. How in your daily life you serve others. How you think of others’ needs first before your needs. How you respect whoever is with you. That is why I see that the organizational union, the organizational cooperative -- these are two good, democratic, decentralized, member-based organizations of the actual producers, actual entrepreneurs.
Changes in the garment industry
In Motion Magazine: What do you see has been the impact of globalization on the women of SEWA? | | | | | | Home-based seamstress. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | | | | | | | |
Ela Bhatt: First of all, it is very difficult to say whether this is because of globalization or something else, but in the garment industry you can see clearly that the products that the workers were stitching are very much changed. The fabric has changed. The design has changed. The basic sewing machine needs to have different kinds of add-ons. Attach this or that. The worker hardly knows where the product made by her is going to be sold because the number of the contractors – the whole class and the type of the middlemen -- has changed. Now, there are educated young men, with the tie, coming, giving work, taking work.
And the demand is changing so fast. Let’s say SEWA Bank gives a loan for machines. Earlier, the old sewing machine was OK. Their sewing machine was 15 years old, but it worked. With the new kinds of products they need another machine. It is called full circle. Earlier it was half circle, half wheel. Now they need a full wheel. Then, they have to put on the electric motor to increase their productivity but also for certain designs. And they have to borrow again for the add-ons. By the time she is trained, or she is ready for (the new add-ons) manufacturing changes and another kind of add-on is needed.
And the samples coming from Bombay, they are so secret.
Because the infrastructure in the slums is so thin, electricity and other things, it becomes difficult for them to sustain the constant ‘other things’. This is the change we see in the garment industry.
Globalization: the construction industry
The construction industry also has changed very fast. Now that India is equipped to tender for global contracts and also now that India invites global companies for construction on big projects, the ordinary construction laborers are losing their chance of work. Young men who have gone through quick training they are now taking their place. Still, it’s a big country and everybody can’t afford those modern houses, so still there are opportunities in the area of rural housing. But, prefabricated walls and rooms, all this is already in the market and being used.
In employment giving, next to agriculture is construction. It is the work for the landless labor from the rural areas, and 60 percent of them are women. They are losing their opportunities, existing employment opportunities. So, SEWA has now been training women construction workers in the modern skills for the last two years. Next month, we are going to have an international seminar on the skill upgradation of women construction workers and we are starting a school for women construction workers. Upgrading their skills for the future industry.
Embroidery and migration
In Motion Magazine: Is it hard to keep up?
Ela Bhatt: It is hard to keep up. Embroidery, for example. In the desert areas, for them embroidery was just a part of culture. They embroidered for the dowry of the daughters. It was never for sale. Their main occupation had been animal breeding, some subsistence agriculture, and raising fodder for animals. Even milk was also a byproduct. But mainly it was animal husbandry. But because of the degeneration of the environment in those areas and the desert coming closer and closer to the district, they had to migrate with their families.
Well, when the government brought the program for supplying piped water to these areas the women were not interested because what could they do with piped water. There was very little water underground. It was saline. And secondly, they can’t stay on the land for half of the year.
So, SEWA was given (the job) to handle this program and we said that the basic problem is migration, and the migration has to stop. Unless we have employment at the doorstep, regular employment at the doorstep, only then will the migration stop. Only then will there be the interest. Unless the people themselves stay on the ground, they cannot regenerate the local ecology. It is they who are going to vivify their lands, not somebody from outside.
So, after two and a half years, we identified that embroidery is a school in which we will build up the economy, the local economy. With a long struggle, and all that, embroidery has become a productive income-only activity for women.
In the SEWA family, three generations in the family, women have worked with their hands. They average 800 to 2,000 rupees per month, regularly, even during the worst drought of the summer. Now, they have gone into the watershed area. They have built their houses earthquake proof, cyclone proof, because that’s a whole area prone to that. | | | | | | Ready-made clothes vendors. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | | | | | | | |
But, again, unless they have regular, sustained income they are forced to migrate. Now, more than 10,000 women embroiderers have got a change on the scene. And of course when they have income they want to eat better. When they have income then they also like to save. And then they want to have better housing. Since they do not migrate, they are sending their children to school. So schools are now full all the year round.
And globalization has given us a very good opportunity to reach the global market. We have our website. Every day we get 10 to 12 queries out of which 8 queries are from abroad. We export. We have an export license. And the best of them, Raji, is being sold through orders from different countries.
Only because we had an organization
This has opened the gates to these desert women to the global market. There are opportunities but only because we had an organization which dealt (with them) in a very businesslike way. And we keep to the principle that any product if it sells for 100 rupees then 60 rupees has to go to the actual laborer, the producer, which is very difficult to maintain. But we have been able to maintain that principle.
You can see that in five years time so much has changed. I don’t denounce globalization, totally. You can’t help it. It is there. It is going to come. We are not so powerful to stop it. But if you can get equipped … .
The interests of the local producers
The other thing is to represent the interests of the local producers at the different levels of decision making of globalization. If you are not organized, as SEWA is, then they will not have a voice or representation. We are on the committees on WTO (World Trade Organization). Actually, the government had asked us to be on the delegation but they didn’t provide the financial supports, so we can’t go.
But the CII, the Confederation of Indian Industries, we work closely with them. Not necessarily everybody is against poor women and poor producers. They don’t know. They have hardly any information, knowledge of the grassroots, of what is happening and of their strengths. Similarly with farmers, small farmers -- our decision makers, our big industries, even agriculture, they have no idea. They have very little information, and whatever information they have is through their brokers, not from the workers, from the producers’ own voice.
In Motion Magazine: So it’s a phenomenon that benefits those that have power, but if you create your own power then you can use it also?
Ela Bhatt: It is not that they are not ready to listen. The CII, which has a lot to do with WTO and other globalizing policy, when we voice our constraints and our opportunities, all are not closed. That is how all these years we have learned to move, to make room for us, without a confrontation.
Using the technology
In Motion Magazine: You computerized the bank not too long ago. I guess that fits in with what you were saying, using the technology that is available for your own purposes? | | | | | | Children in an Ahmedabad neighborhood. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | | | | | | | |
Ela Bhatt: Yes. Also, we have our own videos. We are online. All this embroidery production happening in faraway villages is online. The very next day its accounting -- of finance and raw materials -- has reached our office.
Our own video -- a trained crew. Our best camera-person is a fruit vendor. Our best sound-recordist is an agricultural worker. The whole crew is from our members who earlier had never seen even a TV in their homes. Martha Stewart Communications from New York, she came and trained us and then she also trained us in editing and now sometimes we are on the TV. But mostly we use it for our own purpose.
We have satellite communications (SatCom). The government of Gujarat has given, offers, the facility for a certain period of time during the month and the year to use the SatCom. Not I, but thirty of our organizers and members and leaders, are trained to hold meetings and discussions through SatCom.
In Motion Magazine: It’s a seeming contradiction -- out of poverty the use of such technology. But there’s no reason not to?
Ela Bhatt: Why not, why not? The poor have to have the best of whatever public resources are there.
Changing the balance of power
In Motion Magazine: So where do you see things going? It’s still a tough situation despite all your successes.
Ela Bhatt: There’s nothing like success. With one success to another challenge there is a bond, at the same time. There is nothing like success and nothing like failure. In failure new opportunities come up, and you see some really worthwhile happenings in those failures. It is an ongoing process. I think what is important is a woman’s own self-confidence, women’s own confidence in themselves. That we can do it. Then we will do it. When you are together you don’t cry. We don’t blame the destiny. We don’t blame the system. We are togetherness and have faith in each other and in ourselves.
Life is never without difficulty, without struggles. As we learn, dealing with these difficulties, we manage our own affairs, at the family or at the committee level, or at the organizational level, or at the board level. I firmly believe that that is a process of empowerment. Working yourself, and dealing with your own affairs yourself, that is an empowering process. It is an ongoing process which never ends.
In Motion Magazine: How much social change can there be? | | | | | | Ela Bhatt. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke. | | | | | | | |
Ela Bhatt: I think that is fundamental -- social change. That women sit together, praying together, of all faiths, every day. In crisis, helping each other in concrete terms. Facing the power brokers face to face -- it may be police, or contractors, or a minister, or the prime minister -- trying to bring change in their favor at the policy level. All this is fundamental towards change. And I think that is the right path.
At the same time, we are also conscious that we are not that powerful to stop globalization or to stop the India-Pakistan war, to stop nuclear war -- the same. We are aware of other limitations as well. But, at whatever level we are at we are changing the balance of power in favor of the poor and women. One step is enough. Step by step.
Also see:
-------------------
(Source: http://www.glad2bawoman.com/users/ela-bhatt/1080 )

-------------------------------------------------
Family and childhood
Ela Bhatt was born on the 7th of September, 1933, to Sumantrai Bhatt, who was a successful lawyer, and his wife, Vanalila Vyas was was active in championing women's causes. Ela Bhatt was born in Ahemdabad, and she spent a substantial part of her childhood in Surat. After school, she did her B.A from a college in Surat in 1952. She went on to study law at Sir L. A. Shah Law College in 1953, and she specialized in Hindu law, which gained her a gold medal in 1954. She married Ramesh Bhatt in 1956.
-------------------------------------------------
Work Ventures
Ela Bhatt started off work by teaching English at Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey Women's University. However, she left in order to join theTLA (Textile Labour Association) as a part of their legal department. she joined the TLA in 1955, and her observation about the labour force of women lead her to create the TLA Women's Wing in 1968. In 1971, she received an International Diploma of of Labor and Cooperatives when she was in Israel. She came back and reinforced the TLA Women's Wing with Arvind Buch as the president of the TLA. Soon, her concern about the women's working conditions and labour force lead her to open SEWA, or the Self-Employed Women's Association in 1972. This has been her pioneering work, which has taken fruit after years of hard work and struggle. In 1979, she worked with some others to form Women's World Banking.
-------------------------------------------------
Prominent Work
Apart from the Women's Wing which she initiated in the Textile Labour Association, Ela Bhatt's most prominent work is her initiation and establishment of SEWA, or the Self-Employed Women's Association. this organization promotes empowerment of women, encourages the efforts of rural or underprivileged women. SEWA seeks to provide the necessary support which a certain section of women need, in order to become financially independent. the organization also lends support to these women by ensuring that the working conditions as well as the salaries which they receive are decent, and that they are given the necessary means to stand up independently. The organization stands against the exploitation of these women in the work sector.
-------------------------------------------------
Awards and Accolades
Because of her undaunted spirit, and her successful realization of the dream of empowering rural and underprivileged working women, Ela Bhatt has been given a number of awards, and she has received her due share of recognition. She got the Padma Shri in 1985. She also got the Padma Bhushan in 1986. She has been chosen by Nelson Mandela to be a part of the group of people who will deal with global issues and will try to figure out solutions. This group has been named by Mandela as The Elders. in 2001, Bhatt received the honourary Doctorate degree in Humane Letters from Harvard University. She won the Radcliffe Medal in 2011, she has also received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1977.

-------------------------------------------------

Interview with Ela Bhatt
“How can we live in a world where people go to bed hungry every night? How do we bear it?”
Forty years ago Ela Bhatt founded the first trade union for the millions of Indian women who work to feed their families without the benefit of wage agreements, pensions, health insurance, and paid vacations. In an interview with FOCUS, this “gentle revolutionary” explained why it is essential that the poor and disenfranchised speak with a collective voice – and why women should take a leading role in the development of society.
The Focus: What was it, more than 40 years ago, that led you to take up the cause of the millions of women working for starvation wages in the streets and markets or in their homes to feed their families – women who were not officially classed as “workers” because they had no employer?
Ela Bhatt: At the time I was working as a lawyer for the textile workers’ union. The machine workers in the factories were almost exclusively men. In 1968 two major textile factories were closed; suddenly thousands were without work and lost their income. Working on behalf of the union, I was investigating how these closures were impacting the workers’ families. When I visited the laid-off workers in their homes I quickly realized that the entire responsibility for the family had been shifted to the women.
The Focus: Had the men relinquished their responsibility?
Bhatt: No, but they were no longer in a position to fulfill it by providing a living for their families. They went to demonstrate against the factory closures but they did not bring in any income. It was the women who ensured that a little money was coming in and that everyone had just about enough to eat. At a fundamental level, the situation is almost unchanged today. Among the poor sections of the population you may find unemployed men, but you’d be hard pressed to find a woman who isn’t working. Some are working without pay, others for a few rupees, but they all have one thing in common: they are undertaking productive work and taking responsibility for their families by doing so. Europeans and Americans sometimes find it difficult to understand why these women take the leading role in the family. After all, from their earliest childhood they are the ones who are made to feel that they have less to expect from life.
“From their earliest childhood women are the ones who are made to feel that they have less to expect from life.”
The Focus: Because they are disadvantaged in the working world?
Bhatt: Not just there. A girl from a poor family in India is disadvantaged from birth onwards. She gets less of everything – whether it’s food, toys, time, or education. And yet later, as a young person and as an adult, she’s the one who holds the family together, even when she’s ill or pregnant. She cooks, fetches water, takes care of her own children or younger siblings; she keeps the hut clean, feeds and milks the animals. She repairs the roof, works in the field, and makes clothes. She’s the last one to go to bed at night and the first one to get up in the morning.
The Focus: What kinds of work were the women doing when you visited the families of the laid-off textile workers?
Bhatt: Some were out in the streets and alleys collecting rags – that was the very lowest form of work. Others were selling fruit and vegetables at the market, producing embroidery at home on a piecework basis, or rolling cigarettes. Many were sleeping at night on muddy footpaths and getting up at dawn to look for work in railway stations or warehouses. Others exchanged hardware they had purchased on credit for second-hand clothing in the wealthy districts; at home they washed, repaired, re-styled, and ironed these garments and then re-sold them.
The Focus: When you saw this with the eyes of a committed unionist, what went through your mind?
Bhatt: I saw exploitation in all its forms. The women had no health insurance and they received no pension in their old age. They had no rights in terms of vacation or regulated working hours. In many cases half of what they earned went straight to the middle man who first brought the women from the country to the city. Basically their jobs didn’t really exist; officially they were classed as “not gainfully employed.” Once a woman said to me: “I don’t have any work, but the daily grind of the work I do is killing me!” These words etched themselves in my memory, because they sum up the situation of India’s working poor: a life full of hard work – but work that brings in so little that there’s no hope of ever leaving poverty behind.
The Focus: And that prompted you to try and change the situation?
Bhatt: Yes. I couldn’t stop thinking about these women and their fate. It was clear to me that I had to do something. As individual workers they were invisible, isolated, and totally powerless. They urgently needed a collective voice in society.

The Focus: What did you hope to change by giving the women a collective voice?
Bhatt: Initially, it was literally about these women making themselves visible and being heard, about bringing them out of isolation. When a working woman joins forces with other working women she gains self-respect. She is no longer alone. And she recognizes for the first time in her life not just that she’s doing work but that she is a worker, a producer, that she’s contributing to the country’s economic performance – she isn’t just somebody’s wife, mother, or daughter.
The Focus: Why did this connecting to others need to be in the framework of a union? After all, there wasn’t even an employer to agitate against.
Bhatt: In a union it’s not the for and against that matters most, but the coming together, the collective consciousness, and the formulation of collective interests. You don’t have to have a factory owner on the other side of the table to do that. These working women didn’t join forces against someone, they did it for themselves. By creating the union they laid claim to their status as workers for the first time. It was also my aim that they should be entitled to the same rights as the organized workers in the factories. That’s why starting a union made sense.
The Focus: Presumably your plans were not greeted with unqualified enthusiasm by the union you worked for, the Textile Labor Association…
Bhatt: The decision-makers in politics and business as well as in the unions thought – and still think – of employment mainly in terms of industrial work. The relationship between employer and employee is the only one they can really understand. Yet in developing countries millions of workers don’t have an employer in the standard sense. It was very, very difficult to convince the union management that these people are employed workers too. The union registration body even said: “What’s the point of a union for people who aren’t employed? Who will they agitate against?”
The Focus: So it ended in disagreement?
Bhatt: Yes. The union we had founded in 1972, the Self-Employed Women’s Association, was tolerated under the umbrella of theTLA textile workers’ union for a few years. But in 1981 the TLAleadership informed me that we would have to close our office at the union headquarters. They threw us out! For me this was a parting of ways with the union where I’d worked for more than 20 years. I felt disappointed and betrayed. At that point, women simply didn’t matter to the union. They represented only four percent of the workforce in the textile factories.
“Advances like these raise women’s consciousness – and that’s something no one can take away from them.”
The Focus: Four decades have passed since the foundation ofSEWA. Have you succeeded in achieving your original goals?
Bhatt: I don’t think in terms of success or failure – that way of thinking is alien to me. But of course some things have changed for the better. Soon after our union was founded, the wages for piecework increased by an average of 30 percent. This was a good start, of course. SEWA has grown from being a niche organization into the country’s largest union. In 1982 we had 6,000 members – today we have more than one million. People who work at home or in the streets now at last have an official ID and social security. The women receive payments if they are ill or have an accident at work. Advances like these raise women’s consciousness – and that’s something no one can take away from them.
The Focus: Initially SEWA recruited its members mainly in towns and cities. Were the problems faced by women in rural areas less important to you?
Bhatt: They were just as important – but we couldn’t do everything at once. Today we have more members in rural than in urban areas. We help them form cooperatives, strengthening their position financially and in relation to the buyers of their products, improving their access to loans and insurance, and facilitating shared childcare arrangements. Many of the women who are organized in cooperatives now earn twice as much as they did before. But it’s still a struggle.
The Focus: SEWA Bank is regarded as a pioneer in the microfinance sector. What were the ideas behind its creation?
Bhatt: Back in the days when I was visiting the families of laid-off textile workers, I realized that every woman I spoke to was in debt. This was because the tools the women used for their work did not belong to them. They had to rent the sewing machine, hand cart, even their work clothing – paying interest rates of 20 percent or more per day for the privilege! A woman selling vegetables in a city market, for example, first has to borrow $1.50 from a moneylender early in the morning – otherwise she can’t sell her produce. At the end of the day she has earned, say, three dollars – two of which go straight to the moneylender. Poor families depended on moneylenders for every purchase. There simply wasn’t any alternative for them – until we founded theSEWA Cooperative Bank.

The Focus: SEWA Bank is a bank exclusively for women. Why are men excluded?
Bhatt: Because women are better at managing money. For India at least there are studies that prove this conclusively. A woman who has 100 rupees will spend 96 of those rupees on the family, on food, clothing, schoolbooks, and so on. If the same amount is given to a man he takes more than half of it for himself, primarily for cigarettes and alcohol. For me this means that the family income belongs first and foremost in the women’s hands. Many of the women had good reasons for wanting to keep the family income out of their husbands’ reach. If their husbands were in the union this would hardly have been possible.
The Focus: So should women play a major role in the way society develops going forward?
Bhatt: Not just a major role, but a leading role. Women have always proved themselves the better fighters in natural disasters and times of crisis. It’s in the female sex that I see hope for the future. Women should be at the heart of all economic and social reforms. I believe poor women in particular are the key. For a long time they had to depend entirely on themselves. And even though no one helped them, they survived. They have a resourcefulness, a natural intelligence, that ensures survival. These people have developed their own system independent of the one run by the wealthy and other social classes. If we help them take the initiative, if we give them access to capital and the means of production, then one day they or their daughters will be able to leave behind their meager huts and their life of poverty. That’s the way our society will develop and our economy will grow: one woman at a time.
The Focus: In the 1980s you were a member of the upper house of India’s Parliament for three years. Was this a deliberate attempt to influence politics at the highest level?
Bhatt: I hadn’t planned this brief political career. One afternoon Rajiv Gandhi, our prime minister at the time, called me and said he was going to nominate me for the upper house. At first I felt somewhat lost in Parliament. I listened to the debates and felt rather useless. But once I’d learned the ropes I took up the cause of child labor and workers in the informal sector. Those were my issues – my home territory.
Perhaps my work helped alert our prime minister to the plight of working women. Rajiv Gandhi established a major national commission, with me as its chair, to look at self-employed women in the informal sector. The commission’s work played an important part in bringing women out of the shadows in official terms as well.
“Unless the poor in society can participate in political power we will never succeed in eliminating poverty.”
The Focus: You’ve devoted a large part of your life to the battle against poverty. Looking beyond SEWA for the moment: How can we give poor people a stronger presence in society without making decisions on their behalf?
Bhatt: The battle against poverty is above all a question of political participation. Poverty isn’t a God-given problem; it is man-made and therefore always a political question. For me it’s the political question. My position is very clear: unless the poor in society can participate in political power we will never succeed in eliminating poverty. And it’s important that the poor themselves play a part in planning assistance programs. The money must flow into their hands.
The Focus: So you’re skeptical about large-scale government programs?
Bhatt: I think there’s the danger of patronizing people, of robbing them of their capacity for action. Moreover such programs are not efficient, by and large, unless the infrastructure on the ground, in the urban slums and in the villages, is developed at the same time. The whole thing works to some extent while the state agencies are in situ – but as soon as their people move out it all collapses again. Large sums of money are pumped into programs that achieve very little.
The Focus: The idea of strengthening village communities is a recurrent theme running through your talks and publications. This includes the “100 mile principle.” What does that involve?
Bhatt: Important products and services such as hospitals, institutions of higher education, and banks are often only available far away from villages. This makes them unreachable and unaffordable for many villagers, which in turn increases the pressure to migrate to the cities. Services and facilities like these should be provided locally within a radius of 100 miles, or about 160 kilometers. This makes the return journey – even by bus – feasible on the same day. If the village economy is growing on its own account and a certain level of buying power is achieved as a result, the demand for more advanced education for the villagers’ children also increases. And education, after all, is one of the keys to escaping poverty.
The Focus: But there’s a school in almost every village…
Bhatt: Yes, but how long a child goes to school depends on the situation in the family – and mainly on whether the child is needed at home. Girls generally leave school earlier than boys because they’re needed to look after their younger brothers and sisters at home while their parents work, for example. But without completing school they won’t have the chance to get better-paid jobs in the formal sector at a later stage. Someone who can barely read and write will only have access to simple manual work which is poorly paid.
The Focus: Are you an opponent of globalization?
Bhatt: I’m not so naïve as to think that globalization is something we can hold back at this stage. But I can see what it means for our customers here in India. Emerging and developing nations now have to compete with each other and with the industrialized nations. In India the result is that permanent jobs are increasingly being scaled back as the work is transferred to back-yard operations and homes. I’m advocating a more gentle economy, an economy based on human well-being. How can we live in a world where people go to bed hungry every night? How do we bear it? Perhaps now and then we should stop and think before we go racing ahead, modernizing the world, and should look more closely at the traditional economic and social structures we are sacrificing and allowing to collapse in the name of progress and human development.
The interview with Ela Bhatt in Ahmedabad was conducted by Namrita Shahani Jhangiani, Egon Zehnder, Mumbai, and Arjun Srivastava, Egon Zehnder, New Delhi.
RESUMÉ Ela Bhatt

Ela Bhatt was born into a privileged Brahmin family in Ahmedabad in 1933. She completed her law degree in 1954 and then worked in the legal department at TLA, the textile workers’ union founded by Mahatma Gandhi. She soon realized that the union only helped people in formal employment and that everyone working in India’s informal economy – 93 percent of all Indians, and 94 percent of all working women – enjoyed no welfare protection of any kind. In 1972 she founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) with the aim of giving women working in the informal sector access to basic workers’ rights and to banking and other services. Today more than one million women are members of SEWA. The SEWA Bank specializes in microcredit, giving the women access to finance for land, production resources, and education. Ela Bhatt’s work has refuted many myths of the banking trade. She has proved, for example, that poor people are much more likely to repay their debts than ordinary borrow-ers (98 percent of them do). SEWA’s operations have extended to many countries, including Afghanistan, South Africa, and Pakistan.

-------------------------------------------------

E. L. Bhatt
Ela Bhatt and Her SEWA

In the world there have been always some persons who see the suffering of others and decide to do something for the betterment of their lives. Among such persons a kind and courageous woman of Gujrat, Ela Bhatt, has done something which has benefited thousands of women workers of the unorganized sector. Many of these women are milkmaids, vegetable vendors, housemaids, head loaders and some of them are even hand cart pullers. Pulling hand carts and carrying heavy load on head needs more physical labor, so these are considered to be a jobs more suitable for men.
Ela Bhatt was the head of the Women's Wing of the trade union named Textile Labour Association(TLA), when a group of migrant women working as cart pullers approached her to do something for them. These women literally lived on the streets. While surveying their condition Ela also met women employed as head loaders and learnt about their low and erratic wages. She was filled with sympathy for these women and founded SEWA in December 1971. SEWA, which is an acronym for Self Employed Women's Association, has rendered yeoman's service to the women laborers of the unorganized sector. "Sewa" is a Hindi word meaning service, a word also used in many other Indian languages with the same meaning. SEWA has become a synonym of service to poor self employed women with many of its sister organizations. Some of the services offered by SEWA are as follows:
1. SEWA has a banking system which provides loans to the member women. The loans can be returned in easy monthly installments.
2. The member women are provided with necessary knowhow required in their chosen field of work. For example the milkmaids are taught how to take care of their cattle, what and how to feed them, how to manage their budget etc. The vegetable vendors are taught to keep account of their profit and loss, purchase and sale techniques and preservation methods.
3. The illiterate among them are taught to read and write. They are taught to handle their passbooks without anyone's help. This has given them a sense of pride as they can sign their own name while depositing or withdrawing money fromthe bank.
4. The member women learn child care, health and hygiene, family planning in the supportive atmosphere of their sister members.
These and many other kinds of service are rendered by SEWA and its sister organizations. Today, member women number over a million, who bless the name of SEWA for the improvement it has brought in their lives. Ela herself was awarded the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for her work in 1977. This placed SEWA in the limelight of international recognition. It gained the support of World Bank which wishes similar type of work done in underdeveloped and developing countries.
-------------------------------------------------

Ela Bhatt :
Ela Bhatt is founder of SEWA, India’s largest labor union which represents 1.2 million women in the informal sector from women stitching embroidery and making food products to day-laborers, artisans, waste collectors, street vendors and small farmers. She has received numerous international awards for her work and is a member of The Elders, a group of eminent global leaders who were brought together by Nelson Mandela in 2007.

A Promise to Girls

(Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/desmond-tutu/international-day-of-the-girl_b_1943909.html)
Today is our human family's first-ever International Day of the Girl.
This is a day to celebrate the fact that it is girls who will change the world; that the empowerment of girls holds the key to development and security for families, communities and societies worldwide. It also recognizes the discrimination and violence that girls disproportionately endure -- and it is especially important that one of the cruelest hardships to befall girls, child marriage, should be the UN's chosen theme for this inaugural day.
The marriage of adolescent girls, sometimes to much older men, sums up much of the harm, injustice and stolen potential that afflict so many girls around the world.
Ten million girls under the age of 18 are married off, every year, with little or no say in the matter. That's 100 million girls in the next decade. Their parents may feel they are doing the right thing to protect their daughters, but in reality these brides will be vulnerable to ill health, violence, inadequate education and poverty -- as will their children.
Imagine, instead, the wonderful force we would unleash if these girls could be spared such a life.
They would be more likely to stay in school. Studies have shown that when girls stay longer in primary school, they earn wages up to 10 to 20 percent higher in their adult lives. As they get older, the differences in earnings are even more encouraging: For every extra year in secondary school, they can earn up to 25 percent more in adulthood.
These girls would also be more likely to be healthy, and less likely to contract diseases such as HIV/AIDS than married girls of the same age. And when a woman does eventually start a family, again experts have shown the benefit of having enjoyed a healthy, educated and safe childhood: Rates of maternal and child mortality are also improved by better education, while there are also likely to be happier relations between husband and wife and within the family. What is more, women reinvest more money into their family than men do -- so everyone benefits from the higher earnings.
And we know, having seen it first-hand in successful efforts to reduce child marriage, that these women won't let their daughters marry as children. Child marriage could cease to exist with their generation.
Today, we have the opportunity to enshrine such a global pledge to end child marriage.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), international targets set at the turn of the century, proved it was possible to think, and to act, on the largest of scales: halving extreme poverty, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education are some of its objectives, all by the target date of 2015. Unlike many international commitments, the MDGs are still remembered years later, and helped galvanize unprecedented efforts by governments.
Important progress has been made towards meeting the MDGs: For instance, the target of halving the proportion of people without reliable access to improved drinking water has already been met, and primary school enrolment of girls has equaled that of boys. Overall the MDGs have made a historic contribution towards reducing poverty.
But this progress will be stunted if we fail to address injustices as staggering, persistent and widespread as child marriage. As our leaders begin the process of preparing new development goals to succeed the MDGs, the persistence of child marriage should be seen as one of the major barriers to the well-being of our human family.
Too often, child marriage is justified on the basis of custom or tradition. While traditions often serve to bind societies together, we also want to point out that traditions are man-made. If we learn that they are harmful, we should change them.
In our travels, as Elders, in Asia and Africa, we have met brave girls -- and boys -- who do not hesitate to stand up to tradition and say no to child marriage. In Bihar, a state in northeast India where nearly 70 percent of girls marry before they turn 18 (contrary to national law), we met admirable young people who were signing pledges not to marry before 18. In Amhara, a region in northern Ethiopia, where the most common age for a girl to marry is 12, we visited girls who participated in workshops to discuss collectively the benefits of ending child marriage.
These meetings have convinced us that there is a real need to connect groups around the world, enable them to work together and help to end this practice for the benefit of us all. This led to the creation, last year, of Girls Not Brides, a global partnership of organizations dedicated to stopping the practice, with a membership now growing in the hundreds.
Day after day, the voices of these girls and boys continue to rise higher up the international agenda. We believe that an international consensus on the need to end child marriage is within sight.
When we created Girls Not Brides in 2011, we committed to ending child marriage in one generation. Why not, then, pledge the elimination of this harmful practice by 2030?
Development targets to improve global health, education and gender equality would also be directly tackled by a pledge to end this devastating practice.
And generation after generation, girls would be able to fulfill their potential, amplify the benefits bestowed upon them by their own mothers -- and bless their daughters to do the same.
On this inaugural Day of the Girl, we call on the international community to promise a different life to those girls -- a life of their choosing.
Ela Bhatt founded the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), now one of India's biggest trade unions with more than 1.2 million members. Desmond Tutu is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. They are members of The Elders, a group of independent leaders working for peace, justice and human rights. In 2011, The Elders foundedGirls Not Brides, a global partnership of 200 organizations working to end child marriage all over the world.
-------------------------------------------------

India Loses if Women and Girls Aren't Allowed to Fulfill Their Potential

(Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ela-bhatt/india-loses-if-women-and_b_490212.html )
India is undergoing enormous change. In a very short time, many Indians have become much richer, and our country is now often described as a "world player" economically and politically. Despite this transformation, our rich history, culture and traditions rightly remain important. Indeed, our success rests on this potent combination of the old and the new.
However, we have to be realistic. These traditions are also used to justify outdated and unfair practices which feed inequality and trap many millions in poverty. Women and girls in particular find themselves excluded from opportunities, with the poorest terribly vulnerable to exploitation, neglect and abuse. Women's work is denied recognition or proper pay. They face enormous obstacles in having their voices heard and in claiming rights and freedoms that are enshrined in our constitution and laws but denied in practice.
In some cases, this prejudice is open but in many cases it is subtle -- although no less damaging. What it means, however, is that Gandhi's plea for equality between women and men is being ignored at great cost. Any girl denied the chance to fulfill her potential and any woman exploited and repressed by unscrupulous moneylenders, landlords, traders or even their families is a loss to our country.
Inequality between the sexes occurs not just here in India but all around the world. In every continent, girls and women face barriers in their daily lives which simply don't exist for men. Tradition, culture and religion are often the underlying justification for this discrimination. This is not just unfair but stifles our future prosperity.
This is why The Elders, a group of leaders from around the world, brought together by Nelson Mandela, have called for community and religious leaders to join them in speaking out against prejudice. I am honored to have been asked to join their number and want to share some experiences from my own country.
These are things I have learned from three decades of struggle with SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association in India -- a labor union for women workers in the informal sector. These millions of women earn meager incomes producing goods in their homes, picking and recycling rubbish, working as agricultural laborers, small farmers, construction workers, street vendors and hawkers. Bereft of a voice, they have remained invisible to most of my middle class compatriots and are vulnerable to exploitation and neglect. It is sadly clear how bigotry, dressed up as culture or tradition, helps maintain this unfairness. But it is clear as well the enormous benefits to entire families and communities when women are helped to exercise their skills and talents fairly.
In 30 years with SEWA, I have seen again and again the extraordinary qualities and resilience of these women, whose labor sustains us all. They work incredibly hard. They are as clever and quick as any man in business, dealing with money and making each paise and rupee count.
SEWA has played its role in helping to empower them through work. From tiny beginnings, organizing women workers into a union, SEWA has grown into an organization of 1.2 million members in nine states across India with an impact both at community and national level. By banding together, millions of poor Indian women have managed to improve their bargaining power, produce and market their goods collectively and get access to credit at fairer rates.
For the first time, they have the chance to put money aside, invest in their business, better housing and education for their children. But the impact of financial independence goes far beyond putting more food on the table or securing shelter at night. I have watched them also nurture their communities, stand together in a crisis and learn to speak with confidence. They say their husbands value them more and no longer treat them as inferior. Violence in the family decreases. Decisions are shared and women's influence rises, not only in the family but through the community. Mothers can insist their daughters receive the education they were denied and they actively take part in helping their own communities reach the right decisions on the future because they, at last, have a voice.
None of this would have surprised Gandhi. He strongly believed in women's equality and saw women as natural leaders in the fight for justice and equitable social change. He would have approved of the way women in India are coming together to lift the barriers blocking their progress in a determined but non-violent way.
But as long as women's status is lower than men's and boys are valued above girls, poverty will remain a reality in our country and across the world. We have to rid our society of the view that to be female is to be a second-class citizen, no matter how deep the roots of this belief.
Many of our politicians would still rather ignore the informal sector and the women who form its backbone. They do so at our peril. India's population is young and their aspirations are high. Making the most of all the talent in this country is essential if we are to satisfy the hopes needs of this growing, young population.
Today, we come together to celebrate the special contribution that women make to our world. This 35th anniversary of the first International Women's Day is a time to reflect on women's progress and the obstacles that remain to equality. Our country rightly is proud of its democracy and its diversity. We must make sure that everyone has the chance to succeed, whatever their caste, gender or background. It is the only way to fulfill our ambitions and Gandhi's vision for our country and our world.
-------------------------------------------------