Celebrating Womanhood
Celebrating Womanhood
Women in Gujarat issued Black Paper to Voice their Concerns
It was a historical moment in the Gujarat’s women movement history on March 8 when more than 4000 women gathered to celebrate and commemorate the International Women’s Day at Ahmedabad. Women from all over the state from different caste, creed, religion and ethnicity shared a common platform to voice their concerns and demand their rights. This gathering fulfilled the mandate of Women’s Day that is celebrated across the world as a symbol of solidarity, collectiveness for the struggles and the demands by women.
This collective gathering was facilitated by Mahila Adhikar Abhiyan (Women’s Rights Campaign) which is a collective effort at advocating for women’s rights and security issues in Gujarat initiated by more than 40 NGOs, CBOs across Gujarat. This process has been supported by Oxfam India to build a collective voice of women in Gujarat and open a dialogue between various groups and movements like Dalit and minority rights. The focus was to bring the grassroots women leaders together to collectively talk about women as a group cutting across the different axes of social exclusion.
The collective gathering aimed to celebrate five decades of women’s struggles and achievements in Gujarat and to make the civil society and the State administration receptive to women’s issues in Gujarat. On the occasion, Mahila Adhikar Abhiyan released a black paper ‘How Vibrant is Gujarat for its Women’. This black paper talks about the anguish and peril that women face and analyses women’s situation and enlists their demands to the Gujarat Government. Women took out a rally and gathered near District Collectorate’s premises in a shape of a meeting where women from different areas shared their concerns. The issues women talk ranged between domestic violence, declining sex ratio, dowry, girl’s education, pastureland and livelihood issues, non-availability of basic infrastructure in tribal and minority areas.
The black paper was presented to the State Commission for Women. Some of the main demands flagged out in the black paper to the State government were:
- Increased credit availability to women
- Improved access to quality health care services and inclusion of health care needs of young people in health services
- Redressal mechanism for violations of health rights
- A committee to be set up for dealing with sexual harassment of women at all work places
- A minimum of Rs 5 crore annual allocations for effective implementation of Protection of Women Against Domestic Violence Act
- Land ownership to women recognizing the rights of a wife as equal partner in the land of the husband even if it’s a public land
- Remove identified hindrances to women’s political participation and increase meaningful participation of women leading to cascading effects on good governance and political participation
(Story Credit: Manisha Sharma)