Slur of being single

Sunila Singh – The Hindu – Friday, 24 February 2012 (originally published 21 Feb)

Artists from Orissa during a press preview on the eve of 25th Surajkund Crafts Mela in Haryana last month. Image: Rajeev Bhatt

A national consultation on rural single women threw up a host of issues requiring urgent intervention. The testimonies revealed that wherever single rural women raised their voices, they were likely to be labelled as witches, traitors, agents of social and cultural divisiveness.

A National Consultation on Agrarian Single Women recently focussed on issues of distress, access to livelihood and services. The consultation, a meeting ground of intellectuals, academicians, grassroots activists, rural single women, and widows, examined the larger issues of agrarian crisis and the unabated farmer suicides. In the micro context, they focussed on differential entitlements within the family coupled with institutional discrimination in terms of access to basic services, deliverables and schemes available to poor rural widows and single women.

The Minister for Rural Development, who was present at the consultation, heard testimonies from the women themselves. Women narrated how their fundamental “Right to life” was at stake. They said that not only were their economic, social and cultural rights (right to work, housing, land, health, education) violated, their civil rights were also denied. All this, they said, was coupled with gender-based violence, which they faced within the family and in the public sphere as well . . .

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