Chanchiben walks house-to-house every day in her native Vichchiya village, sharing simple do’s and don’ts on how to stay healthy. She is a farmer with a small plot of land, a SEWA health worker and an acknowledged leader of her village. She is also a Dalit and disabled. Her’s is a remarkable story of struggle, finding sisterhood and strength, and marching steadily towards doosri azadi, or the second freedom that Gandhiji envisaged, freedom from poverty and despair. Born poor in an oppressed community, she has yet another disadvantage – a congenital spine malformation. She explains:

I had little hope from life. In fact, I thought there was no point in my living. Then SEWA sisters came to my village. I joined the union and later our health cooperative. I began to serve others as a health worker. At first the upper castes in my village refused the medicines I offered. Now I serve every home and cross every angan. My village people asked me to stand for election to the panchayat.

Chanchiben’s was not an easy road. When SEWA’s health team suggested that she be trained as her village’s health worker, several village leaders were apprehensive, claiming that her lack of literacy and disabled condition would make it impossible for her to serve others. The powerful Darbar community in her village were outraged at the choice of a young Dalit woman, and flatly refused, at first, to accept her services. But Chanchiben took courage from other SEWA members, and soon became an able health worker and leader.

Chanchiben’s story, and that of thousands of women workers in the economy, all SEWA members, speaks of the transformations that the poor and women, in particular, experience in their lives when they unite and build their own organizations and movement. This is the change that Gandhiji dreamed of, with the poorest of our nation’s citizens central to all efforts – the daridranarayan, and with their concerns, hopes and dreams providing direction for the nation’s growth and development.

The story of Chanchiben, and thousands like her, is the story of SEWA – the Self-Employed Women’s Association – now a national union and a movement of almost two million women across 13 states of India. The journey began in Ahmedabad in 1972, when SEWA was founded by Elaben Bhatt and a handful of worker-leaders who were street vendors, handcart pullers and bidi workers. Elaben is a labour organizer and lawyer, and recalls how she grew up in the heady atmosphere of the independence struggle, with family members going in and out of jail. She and her husband, the student leader, Rameshbhai, were fired up with the spirit of struggle and sacrifice that was sweeping the country, and took to heart Gandhiji’s call to live and work among the poor.

Elaben joined the Textile Labour Association (TLA) or Majoor Mahajan in the sixties, and soon rose to become the director of its women’s wing. The TLA was one of India’s first trade unions, founded well before independence by Anasuyaben Sarabhai, a remarkable woman of her times, and by Gandhiji. In fact, it was Anasuyaben who drew Gandhiji’s attention to the plight of mill workers in Ahmedabad, and the sweat conditions in which they lived and worked, much like workers of the informal economy today.

 

In the late 1960s, it was Supabai, a head loader in the main cloth market of Ahmedabad, who showed Elaben how workers like herself struggled to feed their children, despite putting in long hours of hard labour. Elaben was moved by their plight and their pluck, and began organizing head loaders, SEWA’s first members, into their own union. Soon a veritable flood of women workers – street vendors, bidi workers, agricultural labourers and others – approached Elaben and her colleagues for support. The idea of SEWA was born, a union of the poorest and most vulnerable of workers, women engaged in the informal economy.

The first major struggle of this fledgling union was to get registered. With workers in the formal sector of the economy being the standard, the authorities were reluctant to recognize the early SEWA pioneers as workers. No doubt their being women and engaged in trades like bidi rolling which ‘authorities’ did not recognize as work, had a lot to do with their apprehensions. After much discussion and persuasion, SEWA was eventually registered as a union over forty years ago now.

Constructive action and self-help, ideas that Gandhiji promoted and experimented with many decades earlier, were quickly incorporated into action at SEWA, as was organizing workers, building their unity and solidarity across caste, religious, linguistic, geographic and ethnic lines. SEWA understood early on that we had to organize and struggle for a just and e quitable world, the world that Gandhiji and millions across the country yearned for. We also had to struggle for the essentials: ‘roti, kapada, makaan’, and a life of dignity and freedom from want.

The needs and demands of our SEWA sisters were many and varied. All seemed pressing, but none more than of ensuring access to financial services: a safe haven for women’s hard-earned savings, much needed credit for their businesses, to repair a leaking roof, for paying school fees and expenses during sickness, insurance to protect against the many risks they frequently faced, and pension for support when working for a living was no longer possible. Hence, the first union leaders or aagewans, like Chandaben, a razor-sharp old clothes vendor, approached the banks, then newly nationalized in the early ’70s, for loans. They were shown the door. Women like her, they were told, were not creditworthy, not bankable.

 

Disappointed but never despairing, Chandaben and her two friends, datan vendors Sumanben and Anandiben, got together to convince Elaben that alternative action had to be taken. Assembling at Narayanghat on the banks of the Sabarmati river, Chandaben addressed the hundreds of SEWA members in what became her trademark booming voice: ‘We are poor but we are many’, she thundered. ‘We can collect shares and form our own bank – SEWA Bank. Bolo tyar chho? Are you ready?’

Using the same skills of persuasion she used to buy old clothes from middle class housewives, she now convinced Elaben and others that their own bank was not only required, but possible. Each woman contributed ten rupees from their daily earnings and 4000 women thus collectively put together Rs 40,000 as share capital towards forming their own SEWA Bank. Obtaining a licence from the Reserve Bank of India, (RBI), was another struggle, requiring a leap of imagination not unlike the earlier struggle to set up the union. SEWA Bank was to be a cooperative, owned, used and run by the women themselves as elected board members – not easy for the authorities to swallow! But Chandaben and her team were insistent, wearing the RBI officer down by their sheer persistence. They stayed up all night and learned to sign their own name, with Elaben’s support, proving indisputably to the officer that they were capable of running their own bank.

 

Soon Karimabibi and other garment workers like Rahimaben joined SEWA Bank. They had led their own struggle for minimum wages and had hit upon a powerful strategy for organizing – forming their own cooperative so that they were free from the clutches of exploitative contractors and merchants who paid them a pittance. The cooperative, Sabina, provided work to women like themselves, and now they needed a safe haven for their earnings. Karimaben soon became a board member of SEWA Bank and was elected to the union as vice president unopposed for years, as a courageous leader of the Dariapur struggle. She, in turn, supported Rahimaben to develop as a young leader and serve the union as its secretary for several years. Then there was Malanbibi, Bibi Apa, Shamshadben and others who also took leadership to take their Sabina Cooperative forward, another hallmark of the SEWA movement – encouraging and training future generations of SEWA aagewans.

Another early struggle was that of the street vendors, women like Chandaben and Sumanben, who were keen businesswomen but were pushed around and exploited by the local authorities. Laxmiben Tetabhai was the leader of the vendors of Manek Chowk, Ahmedabad’s bustling traditional market in the old city. She and her vendor-sisters had been selling fresh vegetables, fruit, fish and many other goods in this market for generations. However, the municipal authorities and the police viewed them as a nuisance, ‘encroachers’ and traffic obstruction, never mind that they had been pursuing their livelihoods with little support from the state or anyone else, and long before the advent of cars and the increase in traffic. The vendors of Manek Chowk were regularly harassed by the municipal officers and the police – forcibly evicted, their goods confiscated and rarely returned, or with inordinate delays. One policeman even ran a small restaurant using the confiscated vegetables from Laxmiben and others! Taking daily or weekly bribes from the vendors was commonplace, but it still did not ensure that they could sell in peace.

 

Laxmiben and Elaben soon forged a deep bond. Working shoulder to shoulder, as Gandhiji did with the dispossessed and exploited, they organized all the vendors of Manek Chowk into their own union. They wrote to the authorities, initiated dialogue and asked for ‘do tokri ki jagah’, two baskets worth of space, to sell their wares. They also held meetings with vendors, strategized together, sought the support of the press and the city’s leaders and did what they could to bring visibility and justice for the vendors. When all else failed, they took to the streets peacefully. Elaben, Laxmiben and hundreds of other women vendors of Manek Chowk organized a satyagraha – they sat on the pavements of Manek Chowk and refused to leave till the vendors got justice and were allowed to sell in peace.

 

But the respite was short-lived. The cycle of selling, being evicted with goods confiscated arbitrarily, running to the authorities for reprieve and return of goods, and to the courts to defend our vendor-sisters, continued unabated. It was then that Elaben mooted the idea of approaching the highest court of the land, the Supreme Court of India. In the early ’80s, such cases – of the poor and of informal workers – were not as commonplace in the Supreme Court as they are today. It was hard to find a lawyer to represent the vendors. Indira Jaisingh was establishing herself as an able lawyer of the poor at that time, and she readily agreed to fight our case.

Years later, sitting on a charpai outside her home, Laxmiben shared those early days of struggle at SEWA with me. ‘You should have seen the faces of the court officers and lawyers when we vendors sat on the benches to hear our case being fought by Indiraben,’ she chuckled. ‘We went to Delhi by "balloon" for the first time in our lives. When the plane took off I grabbed Elaben’s hand, I loved it! And when the judge heard us out, we felt so proud, what a long way we had come!’ The case ended in a judgement that upheld their right to sell in Manek Chowk until such time that alternative vending space was provided to Laxmiben and her sisters. The women were jubilant. But the street vendors’ struggle remains a major SEWA campaign to this very day.

The passing of the Street Vendors Bill in Parliament, protecting their livelihoods and accepting their right to ‘do tokri ki jagah’ resulted in celebrations in Ahmedabad and all over the country. It had involved organizing vendors across the country, sustained dialogue with urban planners, officials from the municipal to national levels, politicians of every political party in the country, and even international support and solidarity through the street vendors global organization, Streetnet, which SEWA had co-founded. Pragmatic as ever, the vendors knew that their struggle was far from over, and that the key would be implementation of the new law in every kasbah, town and city. They have understood, in the tradition of Gandhiji, that organizing is an ongoing process – you have to keep on at it. The road to doosri azadi is a long one, always filled with challenges and struggle. It also necessitates dialogue with all concerned in society, firmly but peacefully representing the collective views and aspirations of all, and charting a constructive course ahead.

 

These early struggles laid the foundations of SEWA’s direction and its special culture of solidarity and sisterhood in the years ahead. Today, 42 years after Elaben and the small team of pioneering aagewans founded SEWA under the neem tree in Lokmanya Tilak Bagh, it has grown into a solid movement across 13 states of India, and in several countries. Almost two million strong, SEWA members are now a different breed. With women workers still central to all efforts, today SEWA’s young generation of members have different aspirations and even bigger dreams. They are educated, unlike their mothers and grandmothers, more confident, believe in gender equality and democratic functioning, and are even tech savvy!

But they are still khadiclad, close to their roots and deeply committed to the sisterhood. They are also running their own membership based organizations – SEWA Bank, Vimo SEWA insurance cooperative, Lok Swasthya SEWA health cooperative, Unnat Bazaar or the women artisans’ company, SEWA Cooperative Federation, Incense workers’ cooperative in Munger, several savings and credit cooperatives in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi and in other states, and thousands of small, medium and large unions, cooperatives and bachat mandals or self-help groups of women at the grassroots level. These organizations – more than 3000 of them – are moving steadily towards swaraj and a local, swadeshi vision of the future, while availing of the opportunities offered by the modern, globalized economy and by society today.

 

Through these multiple and varied organizations, women’s leadership is being developed across the country slowly but surely – rooted, authentic and forward-looking. The organizations that women have created are run in a decentralized way, emphasizing autonomy but always stressing democratic leadership. By their very nature, they grow organically and are inclusive. Women from all faiths, castes and communities, bound together as workers and sisters, are elected to the boards and executive committees of these organizations. What has come to be one of the trademarks of SEWA is that the members themselves use, run and own their own organizations as share holders and managers. It is their own leadership, full of challenges and the occasional pitfalls and shortcomings, that result in not only the growth of these organizations and the individual women themselves, but also in the growth and well-being of their families and communities. All sorts of barriers are broken and frontiers challenged, quietly, sensibly and peacefully, as local women alone know how to do.

 

The relatively new SEWA members of Tapi district of South Gujarat, one of the focal points of organizing in recent years, have shown yet again the power of organizing and how it breaks barriers. Lataben, a landless agricultural labourer, paved the way for her adivasi sisters. Quiet and reserved in demeanour, she conceals an iron will and great courage. She organized the women of her Rampura village to claim their wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. They had not been paid for over a year and, unlike their menfolk who were resigned to their fate, were tired of waiting passively.

Collecting signatures for a petition demanding immediate payment of wages, the women marched to the taluka headquarters and sat in dharna till their voices were heard. They had uncovered a nexus of corruption and deceit involving local officials and even their own village sarpanch. The latter threatened them openly if they took matters forward. But Lataben and her little band were fearless, supported by her activist husband, Jitubhai. They took matters to the state capital and were rewarded with payment of wages within ten days. The union membership went up by a few thousand immediately, as women from the neighbouring fifteen villages flocked to hear the Rampura story and seek their guidance for similar action.

Today, Lataben and thousands of others in her district are slowly changing the face of their villages. They are registering their own women farmers’ cooperative, with Lataben unanimously elected to be at the helm. It has been named by the women: Megha Adivasi Women Farmers’ Cooperative, and like so many SEWA-promoted organizations, is the first of its kind. The capacity building of the cooperative members is being undertaken by SEWA’s 105 cooperatives-strong, state-level cooperative federation, having already developed one such farmers’ cooperative in Kheda district. Megha cooperative will promote sustainable agriculture and forest produce, following the swadeshi path by growing food crops for local consumption, plus some cash crops to be sold mostly in the local market. It will also provide financial services, health care and insurance, capacity building and education by linking with its sister SEWA cooperatives for microfinance, insurance and health, already active in the district.

 

Megha cooperative is implementing what Elaben calls the ‘hundred mile idea’ – producing and consuming food locally, and providing at least the following – clothing and shelter, and three basic services: primary health care, education and financial services. She believes that this should form the basis of doosri azadi or the second freedom from poverty. This is also the basis of swaraj, as Gandhiji envisaged, autonomy and self-reliance at the local level, which in turn would lead to true freedom for all our nations’ citizens.

This leadership of women workers does not develop overnight, of course. Their potential has to be nurtured and supported by giving them the opportunity to run their own organizations, but also through appropriate capacity building inputs. SEWA has its own ‘university’, SEWA Academy for this very purpose. Charged with the responsibility of building future leaders to carry the movement forward, SEWA Academy has tailor-made leadership programmes for grassroots women leaders. Before this training, almost none of the women had ever participated in training sessions. Patiently, SEWA Academy’s trainers have to help the women participate actively, commit to the time involved and put their daily work and chores on hold.

 

In the early years, few leaders or aagewans had ever heard of Gandhiji. Never having been to school, they were unaware of his contribution and those of others to our freedom movement. Today, our young leaders have read about Gandhiji in their history textbooks at school. But they are not exposed to the values and beliefs that underpinned Gandhiji’s various actions – from the Dandi Salt March to the Vykom Satyagraha to gain entry of Dalits in temples, or his fasts to promote communal harmony and his long march for unity and peace at Noakhali.

At SEWA Academy, they learn that as leaders of their own movement, they will carry these values forward, for it is ultimately values that will steer the movement forward and keep it on the path to doosri azadi. Of course, debate, critical reflection and discussion of the relevance of these values, and of Gandhiji himself, to contemporary India is encouraged at all times. But the consensus among SEWA sisters is clear – Gandhiji’s thought and action is indeed relevant to our times, if we want to move towards a more just and equitable India, a country where all are valued equally, and are part of the nation’s growth and development.

SEWA now also has significant numbers of ‘white blouse walis’ like myself – college educated, middle class organizers and professionals, mostly women but includes a few men, who were ready to work shoulder to shoulder with their working class sisters. For all of us it has been a rich journey, full of challenges, and yet the satisfaction of taking some steps forward. Most of us had not understood Gandhiji before SEWA. I too had read of him in school, but it was only through our work that I truly began to understand the power of his message and thoughts. His is a holistic and all encompassing world-view, and as I continue to witness the inspirational lives and struggles of our SEWA sisters, the relevance of his thought and action not only for SEWA’s work, but also for our country and the world today becomes increasingly clear.

 

One of Gandhiji’s non-negotiables was sarva dharma sambhava or equal respect for all faiths and communities. Our daily sarva dharma prayer meetings at SEWA is a reminder of the common thread that binds us all. As we pledge ourselves every day to the eleven ‘vrats’ or vows that Gandhiji laid out for all to follow, we renew our commitment to follow the path of truth, ahimsa, swadeshi and sarva dharma, among other core values. This tradition and culture is extended not only to SEWA’s offices across the country, but also to our activities. In our day care centres, women of all castes and faiths lead the daily prayers with children of all communities. They pray, sing, play and break rotis together, building the foundations of tolerance and mutual respect.

The women who run these Bal SEWA centres are themselves workers, organized into their own cooperative. They not only care for the children, all below six years of age, with love and dedication, but also inculcate the joy of learning from an early age. Afsariben is one such committed child care worker and a director of her Sangini Bal SEWA cooperative board. A tea vendor and garment worker, Afsariben joined SEWA after the communal violence and riots of 2002. She was a teenager then and met SEWA sisters in the relief camps. Despite her despair at having lost her home and possessions to violent mobs, she remained positive in outlook and joined hands to take care of the young children at the camps who had witnessed unimaginable scenes of devastation and destruction.

‘The children could not sleep and would cry out in fear at night,’ Afsariben explains. ‘Although I was sad myself, I thought I must do something to help them – our children should not suffer because of the action of adults. So I volunteered to run a makeshift balwadi at the camp, to try and involve the children in different activities and also to provide nutritious meals.’

 

Afsariben still runs the balwadi centre in the same location where the relief camp once stood. Prabhaben and Manjulaben have joined her. The neighbourhood has changed and is now predominantly Muslim. Parents leave their children in the trusted hands of these three women. Many of the children are now in nearby schools, having ‘graduated’ from the balwadis. In fact, all of the children from our balwadis go on to school, and several have even passed out of college, earning much more than their parents could have imagined.

The future of SEWA is safe in the hands of women like Chanchiben, Afsariben, Lataben and Prabhaben. They are continuing the tradition of Chandaben, Laxmiben and Karimaben – leading their families and communities out of poverty, and towards self-reliance. They are leading a movement for change, for doosri azadi, that Gandhiji and other foreparents of independent India dreamed of and fought for decades ago, and for the many who continue to do so today.