Helping women irks men in Haryana district

THOUGH Haryana is an agriculturally developed state, its Rewari district is poor and handicapped by lack of drinking water, sharp gander inequality and educational backwardness. Rewari averages 65 cm of rain annually, not enough for efficient fuming and its salinity is such that cultivating the undulating stretches of the Arivall! hills is a

Amnesty portrays India's warts in detail

IN DAYS long gone, the bearer of bad tidings was usually put to death unceremoniously. In today's more civilised times, we in the Third World prefer to vilify such messengers as biased agents of neo-imperialists, who never hesitate to point out the mote in our eyes while remaining blissfully oblivious to the beam in their own.

SEWA helps working women gain confidence

THE GROWTH of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) is an inspiring story of an unique organisation combining within its ambit labour unions, workers' cooperatives, and a bank. Its members are women working in the "informal" sector, such as ragpickers, vendors and hawkers, bidi rollers and quiltmakers.

Peasant women list their woes to scientists

SALINE and degraded soils, inadequate water, poor quality seeds and the lack of means to own land -- these are the main problems that Indian peasant women face. And this conclusion was arrived at not by agrarian economists or bureaucrats, but by peasant women from the villages of north India.

Condoms for women

A NEW CONDOM for women that gives them greater sexual freedom has been approved for sale in some European countries (Outlook Vol 10, No 2). The condom consists of a loose-fitting, polyurethane sheath with flexible rings at both ends. The smaller ring at the closed end is inserted into the vagina and placed at the cervix, while a larger ring at the open end secures the device outside. The condom is lubricated with silicone and can be used just once.

New aspects to reporting Third World women

THE WOMEN'S Feature Service (WFS) is a news service that deals not just with equal rights for women, but with "development from a progressive, women's, or gender, perspective." It has transcended the Leftist tendency to see women as a force to be incorporated and led and instead stressed women's innovation, creativity and ability as self-employed producers to move out of economic and social crises.

Women engineers come to the forefront

DESPITE sex-role conditioning by teachers and traditional attitudes that rule out floor and site jobs for women, the number of Indian women taking to engineering has increased manifold in the period between 1975 and 1990. The percentage of women enrolled in engineering degree courses has increased rapidly from 1.3 per cent in 1974 to an estimated 11 per cent in 1990. Between 1975 and 1990, India produced 3,37,100 engineers, an estimated 18,875 (5.6 per cent) of which were women.

Scarred by violence and fundamentalism

THE INDIAN women's movement faced several challenges last year: continued violence against women; the effects of the new structural adjustment policies on women's status; the question of political power for women; issues of health and population policies; and the threats posed by religious revivalism to women's rights.

Labourers become quarry managers

THAT LITERACY is liberation may be rhetoric in many parts of the country, but not in Tamil Nadu's Pudukkottai district. Total literacy was reported in this granite quarry region in August 1992, and it brought with it, for the scores of women workers, freedom from bondage and penury.

A bitter prelude to salvation

THE WIDOWS of Vrindavan -- heads shaven, white sari-clad, their devotional routine veiling the indignity of penury and starvation -- have long been an emotive subject for photographers the world over. But who are they? What does their plight say for the status of women in rural Bengal -- where most of them come from -- and elsewhere in the country.