Women, Work and Development in Rural India: A Catalogue of Voluntarism in Policy

This paper seeks to evaluate the conception of rural women’s work evident in the trajectory of development policy in India. It argues that the feature of self-initiated or voluntary participation in development for women is not restricted to the period of structural adjustment. Its antecedents lie within earlier conceptions of national development and women’s role within it which is consistently characterised by a reliance on voluntarism on the part of unspecified community actors. Thus, while the shifting of the onus of women’s development from community voluntarism to small group voluntarism is an important feature of the contemporary period, it does, at another level, extend the trajectory of state policy that has failed to take central responsibility for working women in rural India. Parallel to the shifts in the conception of the rural woman as a receptacle of policy to a consumer of development initiatives through the post-Independence decades is thus the persistence of a half-baked notion of the rural working woman.