Shifting Sands : Women\'s Lives and Globalization
Contents: Introduction/Joy Deshmukh-Ranadive. 1. The adjustment policy programme in India and the household/Joy Deshmukh-Ranadive. 2. Structural adjustment and social sector expenditure in Indian states/K. Seeta Prabhu. 3. Women\'s health--a view from the household/Malavika Karlekar. 4. Perspectives on gender, poverty and environmental connections under economic reforms in India/Kumud Sharma. 5. The impact of the structural adjustment programme on gender and environment in India/Sumi Krishna. 6. Survey findings: a photograph/Preet Rustagi, Vasudha Jain, and Indrani Mazumdar. 7. Conclusion/Joy Deshmukh Ranadive. Bibliography. Index.
"Eager to be \'global\', India\'s economic policymakers have accepted stabilization and structural adjustment as necessary tools of development. What does this mean for women? While gender has become increasingly important in development policies, there is less awareness that policies and structural adjustment are never gender-neutral. The myth of neutrality continues unchallenged while women often suffer de facto exclusion from the development process because of methods of implementation in the field. Government aid programmes requiring the consent of \'father or husband\', Green revolution facilitators who passed on expertise to men only, Panchayat laws seeking to debar women with more than two children from holding office--the instances are legion.
Moreover, there are the social expectations that women must make do with less--less food, less education, less health care. In the era of globalization, where resources for the social sector will come out of an ever-shrinking common pool, the burden on women to \'make do\' in the household will increase, and this will jeopardize their ability to generate human resources. Globalization demands a high quality labour force, but at the same time endangers the conditions that will produce such a force.
In this meticulous pioneering study, the contributors, all well-known women scholars from the fields of economics, sociology, education, health and environment, examine what happens once these macro-policies affect women at the micro-level, within the household, especially the poorer ones in urbans slums and rural villages. Joy Deshmukh-Ranadive begins with an overview of structural adjustment, then K. Seeta Prabhu in chapter 2 charts the decline in social sector expenditure by the state. Malavika Karlekar, Kumud Sharma and Sumi Krishna in chapters 3,4 and 5 analyse the effect of this decline on the health and education sectors and on the environment. They show that coping strategies available to women invariably involve a cost in terms of increased domestic labour demanded of younger girls and women, longer hours processing cheaper alternative foods and materials, invisible piecework in the home which is poorly paid and marginalized. Privatization will inevitably push up the cost of health care even as it pushes low quality state services out of the market. Rationing of subsidized food through the public distribution system will decrease. This is brought out vividly in the household studies in Chapter 6 by Indrani Mazumdar, Preet Rustagi and Vasudha Jain. Finally, Joy Deshmukh Ranadive summarizes the book\'s findings in the conclusion.
Policy planners and commentators who calculate the cost of globalization are rarely aware of these \'hidden\' penalties, or lack hard data on them. This study aims not only to uncover the facts about the implementation of structural adjustment policies, and the possible damage they can do, but also to challenge the attitude that dismisses costs of this kind as incidental, and place concerns over unequal gendered power equations in a central position in the discussion." (jacket)
