Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/264355 
Year of Publication: 
2022
Series/Report no.: 
WIDER Working Paper No. 2022/56
Publisher: 
The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki
Abstract: 
This paper analyses the political economy of women's-empowerment-related policymaking in India through a re-examination of the context of both the genesis and closure of a major programme, Mahila Samakhya. Mahila Samakhya, which embodied feminist philosophy and pedagogy, started in 1987 with the aim of creating the education-based empowerment of Dalit and Adivasi women in rural India, and was inexplicably shut down in 2014. We argue that a combination of political philosophy, electoral majority, and contemporary global trends influenced both the beginning and the demise of the programme. We argue that programmes such as Mahila Samakhya, which called for a long and messy process of collectivization of the most marginalized women using the methodology of reflection and reconstruction, became much less desirable with global shifts in development discourse. These shifts towards more 'evidence'-based policy focused much more on immediate 'outcomes' than on 'processes', much to the detriment of programmes such as Mahila Samakhya.
Subjects: 
women's empowerment
processes
feminist
collectivization
historical analysis
political economy
JEL: 
B54
D63
J15
J18
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
ISBN: 
978-92-9267-187-7
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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