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Why SEWA doesn't want to be a 'good' NGO?

Published on Wed, May 28, 2008 at 11:51 | Source : CNBC-TV18

Updated at Fri, May 30, 2008 at 13:57

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It is not a happy coincidence that the acronym of the Self-Employed Women's Association adds up to 'SEWA' which in most Indian languages means service. In Ahmedabad 36 years ago, Ela Bhatt started the First Trade Union for Women in the unorganized sector. Founder, SEWA, she waged her first battle on behalf of SEWA at Manek Chowk, just outside Jumma Masjid.

It has been some 10 years that Ela Bhatt has stepped back from SEWA. Her days are her own now and with time to nurture private passions, she has been learning to read and write Urdu. But as member of 10 different organisations from the IIM, Ahmedabad to the IRDA, New Delhi - her lasting passion remains her life's work.

Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Ela Bhatt:

Q: All over the world now it seems to be accepted that women are perhaps the most potent of social change, yet was it because you yourself were a women, is that one of the reasons why you decided to focus on women in the unorganized sector? Is this an instinctive decision or an intellectual one?

A: Two reasons I can say clearly why it is women. One is because in Ahmedabad, some textiles mills have started closing down. When I joined Textile Labour Association (TLA), textile workers textile industry was at its zenith. But thereafter years in the 70s, mills started closing down and so our TLA leader asked me to go and find out what is happening to their homes. I saw that their women supported all the homes of the closed textile mill labourwallahs. They didn't have employers, either there were home-based producers working for contractor-sub contractor or they were petty vendors, hawkers, or they were pure labourers. That opened up my eyes. In the year 1975, Mexico City held a Conference - a union conference on women and I came to see that how women and their work has remained invisible. So that has remained with me until now.

Q: When you were going to set up the trade union, when you went to set up the banks - SEWA Bank, it was very difficult for you to get all these registered because nobody could relate to what you wanted to do. Give us a sense of the kind of mindsets you had to deal with or what you had to explain to people to get these ideas through?

A: Registration has been always a big impediment and that is mainly because of a certain mindset, because your members have to be put into a category; some think all jurisdictions, some think all definition.

When we went to the Labour Commissioner to register SEWA as a Union, The Registrar of Trade Union Act 1929, he said that how can you have a trade union? So again whom are you going to agitate? We had to plead for about nine months to convince them that they are economically active and they are earning and they are putting in their labour, so it is gainful work and that the union is not meant only for agitating or against anybody.

Q: So collective bargaining?

A: Collective bargaining, the union is also for coming together and building up your solidarity and solidarity of workers.

Q: Today over 10-lakh women have responded to SEWA's clarion call but over half of them are in Gujarat. Ela Bhatt says, 'she is not into the numbers game'. Even thirty years later it is still tough to get her kind of union going. Breaking down mental blocks as tough today as it ever was.

A: They said that women are not the decision makers, it is a very middle-class idea. That has been the hardest struggle for me. When anybody asked what has been the largest obstruction, you find? I find that middle-class educated, bureaucratic mindset. That mindset of the policymakers or the employers they see work only in that work, which is under specific employer - employer relationship.

Q: Today we are talking about 8% GDP growth, the middle-class is witnessing huge levels of optimism, a sense that there is a better tomorrow, there are opportunities and that there is prosperity. Are you seeing it trickling down to the people SEWA represents?

A: It leaves it to trickle down automatically on its own. Whenever it trickles down, it does very slowly. If I may generalize that in last decade, the poor has not become poorer, but the gap has increased. However, I am not pessimistic because the working poor also need to get organized. I mean SEWA has been able to enter the mainstream and then take the benefit of the new opportunities; the poor on their own come to a certain extent to a certain level. But beyond that they can't. For example when they need to collect the necessary share capital for a co-operative insurance, the poor can collect to a certain extent. Of course you have a large number so we can collect a share capital up to Rs 30-40 crore. But then your rules demand that you need to have more than Rs 100 crore. Then there are policy problems of insurance for life and non-life separately, so Rs 100 crore for non-life, Rs 100 crore for life. But for a working poor, life is an integrated thing; life and then non-life are not separate in the case of working poor.

Q: How do you react to private sector enterprises wanting to get into this space?

A: For one, one would naturally first go to wish for the government. But now that scene is also changing. The government power is declining, the government is more now dependant on the corporates. So it is corporate who is most dominant force today. In that case, we have been making partners, been a member of CII, also being member of FICCI. So we pursue ourselves that we are also private sector. A home-based producer is one who is teaching quilts or one who is making beedies (crude cigarettes) in homes is also a producer.

Why I organized SEWA into trade union and why into SEWA banks in corporate institution right from the beginning, because I always wanted to be mainstream, and not be a nice, good NGO.

Q: So the lady who started her career as a labour lawyer has no antipathy to the private sector?

A: No maybe because maybe we are Gandhians so we have always thought of inclusiveness and Gandhiji's principle law of trusteeship.

Q: In the 2008-2009 Budget, the Finance Minister's loan wavier of Rs 60,000 crore for small farmers, how does it impact what you are trying to do and the kind of message or the kind of education that you are trying to spread among your members both current and prospective?

A: I am not happy. I wish that the Rs 60,000 crore would have had come in the form of investments for the farmers. So that their income capacity grows, helping them to be able to stand in the market with a fair price of their produce, these are the things that I would have wished. However, I am that afraid because those members or the clients of micro-finance institutions and SEWA members - they all by now very well know the governments and their commitments, they will take the advantage of that and will stick to micro-finance institutes as well. Those poor who understand, do know that whatever we have borrowed has to be repaid and wherever there is some warm money - wherever there is corporates, so I call it warm money - then the repayments are far better. Where the working capital has come in the form of grants that is what I call cold money. There sometimes one has difficulty in repayment.

Q: As a humanitarian gesture, would you say that it really makes a difference to a farmer's life, a loan waiver?

A: I am not anti-subsidy if it really goes to the poor and poorest. The life of poor is in a pit, to bring them to a level, you do need to fill up that pit, but because it is loan, its own culture and discipline says that it has to be returned back. So I cannot accept it easily.

Q: A lot of people believe that may be someone like Ela Bhatt, because of the work she has done for so many years, are boring. How do you react to that, what would you say to people like that?

A: I wish I could be very charming and take my message around that strongly, but what is boring is poverty. Poverty, I know now the days are changed. In the days gone by when one talked about poverty, people were keen to know more and to learn about it, but now I know, I do experience personally also that the middle class, don't want to hear about poverty, backwardness anymore and they don't want to believe that. But that is a reality.

Q: Are you saying that middle class today has abdicated its role?

A: Middleclass had failed, of course all over the world it may be the same, but from me the role of middle class is to transform the society to a democratic society. But instead what has happened is that middleclass is becoming more and more selfish.

Q: You were 14 years old when India became independent. It was a time when politics was about idealism and young people had no doubt about their role as nation builders. You became a lawyer like your father, but your late husband Ramesh Bhatt, a brilliant student leader and later professor, who you met at the university, became your lodestar.

A: We became good friends and we use to bicycle together to go back home together. So it was all romantic. But with that romanticism also grew our common shared feelings about how we are going to lead our life and how the society should be and how we should lead the life. So in fact, I married but right from the beginning we sort of knew that how our life was going to be. So I never had to face any expectations of a typical husband to be warm and shady for him. He always wanted me to work, he had to support the families.

Q: You have seen people who have been deprived of a lot of their basic rights. You are 75 years old today what is that keep your spirit intact?

A: It is these women, this grass root contact that always keeps you alive and gives you hope because particularly our our people are so resourceful and they have thought about their problems, they have also thought about their solutions too. So whenever I see them and when I see them collectively bringing all this positiveness and spiritedness into a positive way, particularly women, there is no reason to be cynical. Also I don't aim for a result and we know what we want, what change we want and where it is going wrong. But still I am not in a hurry to achieve something.

Q: You said you are not in the numbers game?

A: Numbers game is not even achieving something because with experience you see that you achieve one thing and then within that achievement too two failures have already been born. Those failures also I don't see as failures because that also throws up lot of new opportunities to go. So it is like a river Ganga moving, sometimes it becomes thin, sometimes it becomes broad and throws away the dirt on the side and still carries a lot of dirt along with that, but still moves for the better. For me how you do things, what way you reach or move that is the most important thing for me. To what really puts its imprint on the history is how do you do duty and in what way.