By Swapna Majumdar In Bangladesh, women tend to visit their parental homes more frequently during the 'hungry season'.
If no such trend has been observed in India, it is probably because social conditioning has prevented women from seeking help from their natal kin.
Indian women are not just the last to eat in the family often, they get the least to eat they also skip meals in times of food crisis to feed others.
It is perhaps this paradox, of food providers themselves being food insecure, which has prevented women from breaking out of the vicious circle of hunger and poverty.
So how can this paradox be resolved? If India is to achieve the millennium goal of halving poverty by 2015 will mere economic growth ensure reduction of gender poverty? What are the linkages between gender poverty and discrimination? These were some of the issues addressed at the Poverty and Gender Summit held in the New Delhi recently.
Organised by the Women's Political Watch (WPW), a women's resource organisation and the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the conference underlined the urgent need to create and implement mechanisms enabling women to benefit from opportunities arising from economic change.
"Women work most of their lives.
Yet, they continue to remain bereft of their share of the development pie," said Veena Nayyar, President, WPW.
"This is because there are structural imbalances that have perpetuated gender poverty.
These aberrations tend to be overlooked while formulating policies.
Women always tend to get pushed into work which is relatively more monotonous, arduous and underpaid." Statistics indicate that 71.94 per cent of the female workforce in India is employed in the agricultural sector that is harsh, exhausting and painful.
Women make up 32.4 per cent of all cultivators and 46.4 per cent of all agricultural labour.
In fact, women in this sector are doubly marginalised.
First on the basis of their gender and then, as landless labourers with no inheritance rights over land or other productive assets.
In addition, they face food insecurity.
"The nexus between hunger, malnourishment and poverty is well known.
The inter-household distribution of food in India is known to be against women and girls," contended Nira Ramachandran of the Human Development Institute, New Delhi.
"While this denial may be self imposed because of social conditions or due to discrimination, the impact is always negative." Enough studies have shown that the impact of food insecurity on women results in a perpetuation of a generation-to-generation cycle of malnutrition, ill health and poverty, which becomes difficult to break.
"Although mortality rates have declined by 50 per cent and fertility by 40 per cent, what is worrisome is that the reduction in under-nutrition has been only 20 per cent.
Even now, one third of all children weigh less than 2.5 kg at birth, half of pre school children suffer from mild and moderate under nutrition and two third of women and children suffer from anaemia," pointed out Prema Ramachandran, Advisor, Nutrition, Planning Commission.
As far as low birth weight is concerned, countries like Pakistan and Bhutan, which are considered to be less developed than India, have better records.
India's performance in reducing wasting or prolonged under-nutrition among children is even worse than that of its neighbour, Bangladesh.
Quite obviously, the scale of economic growth has not led to a corresponding reduction in gender poverty.
"Growth alone will not lead to a reduction of poverty without addressing the issue of employment with social security benefits," asserted Jeemol Unni of the Gujarat Institute of Development Research.
While employment is an important tool towards poverty reduction, it will have no impact if women are unable to engage in economic activity because they spend most of their time in fetching water.
The lives of women can be transformed merely by ensuring the availability of safe drinking water.
A survey conducted to study the gender and economic impact of improved water supply found that women would benefit greatly if they cut down on time wasted in water collection.
The study - carried out by the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), and the International Water and Sanitation Centre and Foundation of Public Interest found improving domestic water supply not only improved health, hygiene and sanitation, but also yielded significant economic returns.
The calculations were made in terms of the costs of reduced time in water collection and the potential benefits of this reduced time.
These showed that the maximum additional income a woman could earn, assuming that the time saved was used in economic activity and that she had the choice of work, ranged between Rs 750 to Rs 5520 ($US 16.50 to $120 per year)! Besides, the maximum time that would become free for personal, domestic, social or developmental activities could be between 45 to 152 days.
Why is it then that the government is unable to use this data to alleviate gender poverty? "Instead of waiting for the government to act, women should acquire the power to define the problem and participate in its redressal," contended Maitrayee Mukhopadyaya of the Royal Tropical Institute, Netherlands.
Having studied the relationship between gender and governance in the context of poverty in several south Asian countries including India, Mukhopadhyaya has found that poverty is inter-linked with the powerlessness of women.
"Women need not just voice their problems but this voice needs to be reach the right institutions.
Therefore, in order to ensure accountability of these institutions, the processes of policy formulation and implementation should be demystified so that women don't get taken for a ride.
By making decisions that affect their lives, women will be able to reduce gender disparities." Gender balance in food security, equality in ownership rights, parity in education, employment and health services are all legitimate rights of women.
Even the government recognises that unless development is engendered and women form part of the solution, there can be no real progress.
Prime Minister A B Vajpayee, who also spoke at the conference, conceded that women could play a greater role in eradication of poverty if they were empowered; he promised a plan to address the issue.
With general elections in India due next year, it remains to be seen whether or not this is merely bait to hook women who constitute a large chunk of the electorate.
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