Changing people to change institutions

How then do we make public institutions more responsive to the needs of women? Naila Kabeer, a fellow at the Sussex-basedInstitute of Development Studies, had spearheaded a gender planning training project designed to make IAS officers more gender-sensitive. The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration at Mussoorie set up its own gender centre six months ago at the culmination of this initiative. The idea of the programme was really quite simple: to integrate a gender perspective into the administrative and planning processes.

Kabeer, who was in Delhi recently, explains the objective of the initiative: “If the desired result of development is human well-being, the question that has to asked is, what constitutes `human well-being’ for those who have been largely excluded from the policy-making process.” Kabeer is quite clear on what the first priority of policy-making and administration must be: to address the basic survival needs of the poor.

Whose well-being? That is the question, she says, administrators have to constantly ask themselves, because in the clamour of contending demands, the weakest and theleast visible often lose out. Take the typical case of a woman seeking police protection from an abusive husband.

While the woman needs to be relieved from the fear of being battered within the four walls of her home, her husband, in contrast, wishes to be saved from the social opprobrium attached to his wife’s police complaint. In most cases of this kind, the police is more sympathetic to the husband’s plight and attempts to paper over the couple’s marital differences or discount the woman’s complaint completely.

Kabeer believes that the Indian Administrative Service, by and large, reproduces within itself and through its functioning all the inequalities of society at large. It is a system that promotes elitism and suppresses the creativity and independence in its officers. Its failure to deliver in the course of 52 years of independence, despite the efforts of some visionaries within its fold who had struggled courageously against the tide, stems from these basic anomalies.

There are several areascrying for change. Take something as seemingly insignificant as school textbooks, which play a crucial role in moulding tomorrow’s citizen. They continue to paint women in the most restrictive of roles. Forest officials, even as they talk of joint forest management, keep missing the wood for the trees. While they intimidate women foraging for fuel in the forest, theyallow the well-connected timber mafia to proliferate.

Health and family welfare initiatives are often founded on the most obnoxious attitudes to women. Says Kabeer,“They treat women as an input-output machine. They don’t bother to think about what makes women want to have children, what makes families want to have children, the role of men in all this.” She also points out that although family welfare pamphlets are full of politically correct terminology like `reproductive choice’ and `maternal and child health’, in reality nothing has changed. The target approach has ostensibly been waived, but the target mentality is still in place. In thepanic of wanting to control burgeoning numbers at all cost, women are still being reduced to their reproductive organs. “The truth is, the system never seem to have the time when it is dealing with poor people,” she observes.

But can the system be reformed, given its inherent biases and weaknesses? Kabeer believes that it is important to keep chipping away at the edifice and the gender planning and training project was just one such initiative. The people who participated in the programme included bureaucrats, police officials and people from the voluntary sector. “It was a very mixed crowd; some were already committed to the idea of social justice, others were not, and there were some in the middle who seemed to say, `persuade me that what you say is not some loony rubbish’.”

There were some unexpected results. Many from the police force who had attended the training expressed concern over the image of the force and the fact that the police, generally speaking, did not seem to be serving a sizeablechunk of the population. Kabeer remembers one male police officer in his mid-forties who expressed a desire to change the “masculine” image of the force.

Incidentally, it was not just these participants who changed in the course of the interaction. Kabeer believes that she and her colleagues did too. There were times when she felt like punching someone in the face for his or her attitude. But experience taught her some important lessons: to be blindly angry with the world for its various injustices was self-defeating, just as the mere mouthing of articles of faith did not get you far. It was far better to search for new way to appeal to a person’s inherent sense of justice.

To change people you have to appeal to reason, not emotion. She puts it this way,“If you go for the heart, you may get an immediate and emotional response but also an attitude that borders on welfarism, a tendency to view people, especially women, as `victims’. If you go for the head, and convince people, then hopefully you get acommitment to gender justice as well. You can’t sustain high emotion, you can sustain reasoned argument.”

If you change people, you change institutions.