Destitution to Leadership* is a collection of published articles and messages on the Working Women’s Forum (WWF) and the leadership provided by Dr. Jaya Arunachalam. An ardent crusader for working women’s welfare, working with poor women, she has found, despite all the four conferences focussing on the women’s movement world-wide, gender-based deprivation and discrimination continue not only in poverty groups but also in other classes.

Coming from a family of devoted Gandhians, Jaya Arunachalam chose to work for working women as she felt politics neither allowed power sharing nor dignity to women. Jaya, a Brahmin herself, broke the shackles and married a Chettiar as early as 1955, setting an inter-caste example. She, along with some like-minded women, in 1978 organised a group to provide a platform for poor working women. As President of the Forum, she wanted initially to empower 800 underprivileged women with financial literacy and micro-credit. In thirty years, the Forum has reached out to 13 lakh women in 3,800 villages in the southern states. WWF did this by combining economic development with nutrition, health and general awareness. In its three decades, the network has empowered women in 270 occupational groups. They include vendors, hawkers, weavers, lace-makers, agarbatti rollers, and fisherwomen.

Former First Lady Hillary Clinton with Jaya Arunachalam.

According to a 55-year-old woman field worker there is space for both educated and uneducated women in the Forum, and she guides and trains local area leaders in organising groups to achieve the goal. Over the years, the Forum has expanded its activities to include programmes for reproductive healthcare, sanitation, access to water and land, social security, human and labour rights. It fights child labour and prostitution and women exploitations in all forms. Jaya believes that providing skills and confidence to women is far more beneficial than mere charity. She does not believe it is the duty of the rich to provide charity or the right of the poor to receive it. She declares, “Go out and change the circumstances in which poor people are living.”

Jaya Arunachalam believes that the low socioeconomic status of women in India is the greatest barrier to development. Around the same time as the women’s movement was picking up in the West, Jaya went a step ahead by seeking to empower Indian women through micro-finance. Using case studies she taught women the impact of educating their children and the importance of health care. Many of her network leaders make greater change by representing their villages in Panchayats and a large number hold positions in them, thus becoming the largest political representation of women in local administration in the world. The 2011 World Development Report on Gender says, the women’s representation on Panchayats – where the representation is 33 per cent of the seats – has led to greater development in infrastructure like roads, clean water and education, and less government corruption and waste. Arunachalam believes that once a woman is empowered she is changed forever. And she realised that for change, she needed to have women from the grassroots and not from the middle class.

As Jaya’s contributions towards poverty eradication have been globally recognised and have led her to many an international forum for pro-poor strategies and models, she says that she did not become an agent of social change by choice. When she was on a mission of rehabilitation of flood-affected areas in 1977 and distributed relief materials, she realised there were many untold problems for the poor woman. In fact, she found that the poor were only waiting for such disasters as only then that they got some relief! Distressed by their ignorance and since poverty was imposed on them by society, she realised the need to give them a social platform. Though she was a Congress Party member, she left politics and engaged herself fully in ways to empower women. She taught them to come out of the shell of superstitious beliefs and look at life with a positive attitude. For members of the Forum she started the microcredit programme to strengthen their economic power.

During an award presentation ceremony for the Forum in The Netherlands, Ten Cate, President, Business Club Rotterdam, highlighted the ability of the credit institution of the WWF to achieve a repayment rate of 98-99 per cent, which few institutions can boast of. Hillary Clinton, talking about the WWF during her visit to India in July 2011, said, “We also want to continue working with the WWF on the very serious problem we just heard about, violence against women.” Hillary appealed to all to follow Jaya’s model, especially in empowering women and giving everyone a chance to live up to her God-given potential.

While delivering a lecture on the concluding day of Prajnya, a campaign against gender violence, Jaya said that suppression of women’s right is as old as Manu. She said, on the role of the media, that though importance is given to gender injustice, instead of covering women’s daily problems, the media resorts to sensationalism and dramatisation of repulsive events. For her single-handed effort in popularising micro-financing for the poor, the Jamnalal Bajaj award was given to her and the citation said that the experiment of the WWF spelt success and proved that poverty is not a barrier for the poor to become an agent of the social change.

Melanne Verveer, US Ambassador-at-large, Global Women’s Issues, interacted with WWF members in Chennai in September 2010 and promised to inform her government that it had a lot to learn from WWF.

Marco Visscher wrote in a Dutch magazine in March 2007 that Jaya felt the need to do something rather than talking as most politicians do, and “rolled up her sleeves and got down to work on behalf of the underprivileged women... She believed that change came from the bottom up rather than top down.”

Encouraged by the success of micro financing that became an instant success, WWF in Tamil Nadu went on to promote a series of women’s co-operatives in the neighbouring states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. In 1994, the co-operatives were brought into a single administrative network called the Indian Co-operative Network for Women (ICNW). Adopting the co-operative as a way to credit extension, the ICNWs are being successfully run and managed by the poor women workers themselves. They act as shareholders, field personnel and even directors.

Jaya Arunachalam was awarded Padma Sri in 1987 for her distinguished service in social work.

* Edited by Srividya G. Ammanur and Dr. R. Asha (T.R. Publications Pvt. Ltd.)