Dr Shivani Bhardwaj
Dr Shivani Bhardwaj is currently working on research on "Perceptions of men on the gender resource equality". Her assignments of training Indigenous people on gender and resource rights with Navrachna and Traid Craft U.K. furthered her mission to contribute to gender equal neighbourhoods". Dr Bhardwaj has a long term mission to develop gender equal sustainable local area plans for each neighborhood. Currently she is developing a pilot in Uttarakhand and another In Jharkhand. Her work on women and land rights got together members from 22 countries to advocate for women and property rights. She works for a mental wellness support group at the local levels and mentors youth towards contributing while learning to be adult. She has authored numerous publications on training, land rights, child rights, safeguarding and on gender resource gap. She is among the founders of SAFP, Pravah, Nirmana and National Alliance for Labor Rights, and a global forum called the Consult For Women and Land Rights (CWLR).She is member of Habitat International Coalition and Food and Water Security Coalition India. She was a member of the steering committee of the World Urban Campaign and Gender Equality Action Plan of the UN Habitat. She is on the board of startups like Green Assets, Love Your Neighborhood Campaign and had lasting links with movements on labor rights, youth, queer and women. She is member of sexual harassment committee of a research organization, two law firms, Ministry of Food and CAG Government of India.
Dr Bhardaj takes on consulting assignments for example, she conducted an end line evaluation of a livelihood project for Karuna Trust UK besides drafting and upscaling strategy for Jan Sahas for its Prevention of violence for women and girls work. Conducted national scale research projects for Action Aid India and Educo during the pandemic was a challenge as travel was restricted those days. Dr Bhardwaj is free to undertake extensive travel for work locally and internationally. She has worked for Caritas India on Safeguarding, and reviewed global call for proposals for Geneva Global Inc and Co-Impact. She has Developed Aftercare Programme for an NGO called Udayan Care and relates on issues around empowerment of care leavers from this experience. She was the National Program Manager for Poorest Area Civil Society Programme for DFID. She was the CEO of Sathi All For Partnerships when she also worked on monitoring and evaluation of projects, research and training assignments. She has 50 publications to her credit that were linked to assignments with IFAD, UN Women, Jamia University, and with UNICEF in Assam. She worked as Gender Advisor Royal Embassy of Norway in India, Habitat International Coalition, IDS Sussex, Plan International, Save the Children (UK), GIZ, Indo German Social Service Society and is on the board of three development organizations.
Dr Bhardaj takes on consulting assignments for example, she conducted an end line evaluation of a livelihood project for Karuna Trust UK besides drafting and upscaling strategy for Jan Sahas for its Prevention of violence for women and girls work. Conducted national scale research projects for Action Aid India and Educo during the pandemic was a challenge as travel was restricted those days. Dr Bhardwaj is free to undertake extensive travel for work locally and internationally. She has worked for Caritas India on Safeguarding, and reviewed global call for proposals for Geneva Global Inc and Co-Impact. She has Developed Aftercare Programme for an NGO called Udayan Care and relates on issues around empowerment of care leavers from this experience. She was the National Program Manager for Poorest Area Civil Society Programme for DFID. She was the CEO of Sathi All For Partnerships when she also worked on monitoring and evaluation of projects, research and training assignments. She has 50 publications to her credit that were linked to assignments with IFAD, UN Women, Jamia University, and with UNICEF in Assam. She worked as Gender Advisor Royal Embassy of Norway in India, Habitat International Coalition, IDS Sussex, Plan International, Save the Children (UK), GIZ, Indo German Social Service Society and is on the board of three development organizations.
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Papers by Dr Shivani Bhardwaj
participatory quality for orphaned/ abandoned children and youth
without parental care or those residing in institutional care, there is
an urgent requirement of policy shift and extension in the aftercare
of the youth sphere. These children must be conferred with rightsbased
privilege and responsibilities by the federal government in the
management of state resources and property as their guardians and
carers. This policy and programme shift would formally recognise
these youth care-leavers (YCLs) as wards of state, provide them with
employment and income sources and grant them legal inheritance
rights to public property. This policy reform entails provision of legal
identity on the care-leavers as state's children, prior training in
vocational skills, harnessing of life-skills, and management
capabilities and linking them to public institutions for life beyond
aftercare. The authors advocate for the states of India to widen their
scope and include 'those in care of the State' as leaders and change
agents in resource management through a proposed right to
inheritance. This would pave the way for inclusion and equality of
the marginalised and stigmatised population cohorts, in this case the
YCLs, and yield demographic dividend for the country.
residential senior-care living institutions located in Delhi and Dehradun. The feminist analysis is postulated on the interrelationship of resources,
relationships and resilience these women balanced through choices they
made to lead a better life. The article shows that women situate themselves and their wellness in alternate ways of living beyond the patriarchal control of familial based resources. Access to
resources has healed women to be stronger and independent to form new
relationships and community solidarity at their older age. The breakdown of family-basedcare systems made these women plan for their future to live lives independent of family. This can be possible for women from lower economic class with support from government and stakeholders who need to support collectives to set up safe spaces in every neighbourhood as an alternative inclusive care network that each human being is a member of for times that family abandons them.
Keywords: Living arrangements of older women, Gender and
resource management, Older women and resilience, Retirement
retreats and older women.
Caregiving can improve the activities of daily living for the older person to enable them to have the choice to be active and entertained while fulfilling their responsibilities and exercising their rights. This requires resources to pay for the immediate and extended needs of the older persons. In India, this caregiving match to individual needs and rights has a gender differential. Gender roles and relationships of both the care receiver and the caregiver exist within the context of the gender resource gaps that can be addressed.
designed to reduce the gender disparity. Research, advocacy, and field-based action work done by Sathi All For Partnerships has proven that healthy and active aging is a desired sustainable goal and social capital development is doable by creating WRZs at the local area such as neighborhood level. It is advisable that instead of providing piecemeal and
reactive solutions that are withdrawn like the public transport subsidies, granting Gender Resource Gap in Caregiving of Older Adults in India 19
old-age assistance, pensions, and health care subsidies should be adjusted to inflation. Fiscal and development policymaking between at the center and the state must focus on bringing in structural changes in district and block levels that provide the older adult women their role that ordains their status with adequate opportunities to contribute in community development activities. National level programs for the
older adults must envisage long-term participatory and rights to development-based approach beyond the right to survival, in which older adults get to contribute, experience a sense of ownership and belongingness that is based on them getting spaces to manage within the local area plan. This is possible only when human beings are capacitated at each age in their life cycle.
First Online: 21 September 2023
Part of the New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives book series (NFRSASIPER ,volume 71)
Abstract
Gender inclusion and gender equity policy in India has been largely biased towards the capitalist and elitist groups and has conveniently overlooked the issues of sustainability and empowerment of weaker sections. Notwithstanding, government policies at the macro level often undermine the agencies of women due to their unequal resources to be in a position of power. Gender resource gaps (GRGs) are multiform and appear as multiplying for the woman due to socioeconomic disparity. The identification and mapping of the gap enable the planning to intervene. A proper plan could allocate spaces and resources to bring in people from the margins who can make areas regenerative when they have a stake in it. This inclusive regenerative plan is a sustainable development zone within which a Women Resource Zone (WRZ) exists. This chapter showcases the need for reimagining WRZs and draws best practices and recommendations as given through the years of strategic impact experience of the Sathi All For Partnerships (SAFP), a registered trust in India, in collaboration with other stakeholders. SAFP has calculated the GRGs for women and children of excluded communities and recorded discrimination faced by women belonging to marginalized sections (middle aged, caste and religious minorities and youth care leavers) to sharpen resilience through advocacy and training activities in India for a broader prospect of achieving the SDGs.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-99-3696-0_7
This article holds the State as responsible for the wellbeing of those it has
taken the responsibility of protecting. These include people who have suffered violence, indignity, hunger and life-threatening circumstances. The five-year planning of state and district plans have utilised more resources than produced outcomes and output. This article provides strategies that can facilitate duty holders to emerge as more responsible
actors during the pandemic that continues.
In Gender, Power and Identity: Essays on Masculinities in Rural North India, Prem Chowdhry traces a history of gender relations in pre-colonial times that were defined by consent in marriage as well as sexual liaison. The prevalence of gender-equal choice was due to the demand of labour that during the British fostering inequality.
This humorous delight of a Masculinized hegemony is dismissed by women’s songs that challenge the sexual adequacy of the male, who then seek refuge in body building and indulging in substance abuse.
In the self-curated design of the book cover that is a painting by the author, lived experiences of a number of informants active in civil society, media and the academia have been depicted: A man holding a bamboo staff depicts his combative stature though his expression does not give away emotion, not even through his eyes that seem paralyzed in a puzzled perpetuity. The need to control marital and even sexual liaison led to a crisis faced by men. A women bore the brunt of transgression of caste boundaries—severe punishment even with death—whereas the man was valorized for the number of murders to his credit using a range of weapons. The books analysis of Khap and practices of safeguarding honor, makes it relevant to law, social work scholars as well those studying masculinities as it sees the evolution of gender relations in a particularly reactionary segment of North Indian society.
Forest Protection Committees, the Van Utthan Sansthan
(VUS). In 2003 VUS acquired a formal status as a nongovernmental
organisation that protects and manages
67,000 hectares of forestland in more than 240 villages in
Udaipur, Rajasthan, under Joint Forest Management (JFM).
Today VUS successfully engages with tribal communities
to work together for forest protection by improving
common land and forest resources governance. It has
addressed overgrazing, mining and illegal privatisation of
forestlands. It has also been instrumental for achieving an
increase in livelihood opportunities for communities.
villages of Telangana State, India, transformed 1400 acres
of infertile and idle wasteland into cultivable land using
dryland farming. Realising the potential of the improved
land, the absentee landlords tried to reclaim the land by
threatening the tenants with eviction. Following a
considerable struggle with the landlords, the farmers’
collective, with the support of SDDPA, successfully
negotiated the registration of land in the name of 395
families. The security of tenure for the farmers has
prevented the loss of livelihoods, enhancing agricultural
and environmental sustainability in the area.
Urban planning policies are neither inclusive nor sensitive towards gender based development of urban spaces and services even though currently 31.16% (2011 Census) of Indians are living in cities. In a recent report by Government of India, urban poverty is over 25 percent; some 81 million people live in urban areas on incomes that are below the poverty line. The rapid growth of cities poses distinct challenges for housing, water, sanitation, health, education, social security, livelihoods and the special needs of vulnerable groups such as women, children, and the aging. It is this under served category of people that are impacted by insecure and undefined land tenure system.
The existing culture of permissible and non- permissible spaces and boundaries perpetuates use of violence against those who challenge the differential access to spaces within the city and neighborhood. Urban violence in the public domain amounting to clashes between different groups is often played out in terms of attacks on women. Within the household, family members subjected to domestic violence continue to remain in abusive relationships when they are unable to secure rights to land and property. The household presents complexities developed as a result of differential health status (mental health, aging, disability) of members. Anecdotal evidence from mental health institutions suggests that many women are forcefully evicted from their accommodation on false charges to usurp their property.
Women and girls continue to be poorer than men worldwide and experience greater gender based disparities and difficulty in accessing finance, education, planned services and decision-making opportunities.
It is time to embed gender focused planning at every level of government because women and men use public and private spaces differently and have different concerns about how it meets their needs. Additionally there is imminent need to bridge the gender gap in urban development to mend disparities in opportunity; to build capacity; to manage productive resources; to create safe spaces; and to improve ownership of assets and housing across women and men.
The research and advocacy work done by Sathi All for Partnerships (SAFP) in application of Gender Resource Gap (GRG) differential in planning demonstrates that women are not a homogenous group and therefore have different abilities to manage spaces. Inclusive policies to address gender gap require structured changes in space and law to cater to the needs of “silent” women differentiated by religion, caste, age and abilities across all income levels.
Based on empirical evidence gathered through ground level research by SAFP on GRG as an inclusion strategy, we will share urban poverty reform discourse in India. Some of the key questions we will examine are: how to engender inclusion of GRG gap at various levels of government when determining resources towards infrastructure projects, greening areas and decongestion plans to ensure women and men have equitable access to resources? What policy and support from the government is required for women to manage and maintain private assets, properties and public spaces without experiencing violence?
organizations - Sathi All for Partnership (SAFP) , EqualSaree and Towards Action And Learning (TAAL) (together
known as the SET team) in the two villages of Madhya Pradesh for development of women inclusive resource
zones. The inclusive resource zone encourages special measures that need to be undertaken by women,
government agencies and community groups to build a protective environment for inclusion and promotion of
women in infrastructural development. Woman Resource Zone (WRZ) within an inclusive planning of a local area
redefines conventional planning to address inclusion of men and women equally. Since land use development is
linked to many other local and national resource systems in practice, a system for convergence is required to
identify critical gaps in gender equity and resource requirements to lay claim on budgets controlled by different
government departments. Therefore, coordinated action and response from civil society institutions, women’s
groups, state agencies as well as district, state and central government departments is needed by integrating
policy implementation through WRZ for schemes related to: land policies, water planning and climate adaption
plans based on Food Security Act, Right to Work, Forest Right Act etc. through MNREGA, NRLM and livelihood
initiatives and care needs at the village level. The lessons learned from evaluation of pilots and government
schemes for sustainable development should be used to draw out the possibilities for a gender equal village plan
using the Women Resource Zone (WRZ) as an inclusion mechanism.
This document provides an example of the benefits that could accrue to the tribal and ‘dalit’ communities as a
result of local planning that includes women getting access to land and resources. Initial feedback from the
participants indicates that the Rural WRZ framework developed in Madhya Pradesh has the capacity to: improve
inclusion of women from vulnerable communities, improve land based production and natural resource protection
through local governance. It offers an implementation model for inclusion of the changes that are envisaged in the
recently announced food bill, ban on manual scavenging, land policy as well as the draft land rehabilitation bill
under discussion. However, the work requires more research and linking local groups to district and national
planning and development mechanism to make gender plans work for sustainability at the local level.
participatory quality for orphaned/ abandoned children and youth
without parental care or those residing in institutional care, there is
an urgent requirement of policy shift and extension in the aftercare
of the youth sphere. These children must be conferred with rightsbased
privilege and responsibilities by the federal government in the
management of state resources and property as their guardians and
carers. This policy and programme shift would formally recognise
these youth care-leavers (YCLs) as wards of state, provide them with
employment and income sources and grant them legal inheritance
rights to public property. This policy reform entails provision of legal
identity on the care-leavers as state's children, prior training in
vocational skills, harnessing of life-skills, and management
capabilities and linking them to public institutions for life beyond
aftercare. The authors advocate for the states of India to widen their
scope and include 'those in care of the State' as leaders and change
agents in resource management through a proposed right to
inheritance. This would pave the way for inclusion and equality of
the marginalised and stigmatised population cohorts, in this case the
YCLs, and yield demographic dividend for the country.
residential senior-care living institutions located in Delhi and Dehradun. The feminist analysis is postulated on the interrelationship of resources,
relationships and resilience these women balanced through choices they
made to lead a better life. The article shows that women situate themselves and their wellness in alternate ways of living beyond the patriarchal control of familial based resources. Access to
resources has healed women to be stronger and independent to form new
relationships and community solidarity at their older age. The breakdown of family-basedcare systems made these women plan for their future to live lives independent of family. This can be possible for women from lower economic class with support from government and stakeholders who need to support collectives to set up safe spaces in every neighbourhood as an alternative inclusive care network that each human being is a member of for times that family abandons them.
Keywords: Living arrangements of older women, Gender and
resource management, Older women and resilience, Retirement
retreats and older women.
Caregiving can improve the activities of daily living for the older person to enable them to have the choice to be active and entertained while fulfilling their responsibilities and exercising their rights. This requires resources to pay for the immediate and extended needs of the older persons. In India, this caregiving match to individual needs and rights has a gender differential. Gender roles and relationships of both the care receiver and the caregiver exist within the context of the gender resource gaps that can be addressed.
designed to reduce the gender disparity. Research, advocacy, and field-based action work done by Sathi All For Partnerships has proven that healthy and active aging is a desired sustainable goal and social capital development is doable by creating WRZs at the local area such as neighborhood level. It is advisable that instead of providing piecemeal and
reactive solutions that are withdrawn like the public transport subsidies, granting Gender Resource Gap in Caregiving of Older Adults in India 19
old-age assistance, pensions, and health care subsidies should be adjusted to inflation. Fiscal and development policymaking between at the center and the state must focus on bringing in structural changes in district and block levels that provide the older adult women their role that ordains their status with adequate opportunities to contribute in community development activities. National level programs for the
older adults must envisage long-term participatory and rights to development-based approach beyond the right to survival, in which older adults get to contribute, experience a sense of ownership and belongingness that is based on them getting spaces to manage within the local area plan. This is possible only when human beings are capacitated at each age in their life cycle.
First Online: 21 September 2023
Part of the New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives book series (NFRSASIPER ,volume 71)
Abstract
Gender inclusion and gender equity policy in India has been largely biased towards the capitalist and elitist groups and has conveniently overlooked the issues of sustainability and empowerment of weaker sections. Notwithstanding, government policies at the macro level often undermine the agencies of women due to their unequal resources to be in a position of power. Gender resource gaps (GRGs) are multiform and appear as multiplying for the woman due to socioeconomic disparity. The identification and mapping of the gap enable the planning to intervene. A proper plan could allocate spaces and resources to bring in people from the margins who can make areas regenerative when they have a stake in it. This inclusive regenerative plan is a sustainable development zone within which a Women Resource Zone (WRZ) exists. This chapter showcases the need for reimagining WRZs and draws best practices and recommendations as given through the years of strategic impact experience of the Sathi All For Partnerships (SAFP), a registered trust in India, in collaboration with other stakeholders. SAFP has calculated the GRGs for women and children of excluded communities and recorded discrimination faced by women belonging to marginalized sections (middle aged, caste and religious minorities and youth care leavers) to sharpen resilience through advocacy and training activities in India for a broader prospect of achieving the SDGs.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-99-3696-0_7
This article holds the State as responsible for the wellbeing of those it has
taken the responsibility of protecting. These include people who have suffered violence, indignity, hunger and life-threatening circumstances. The five-year planning of state and district plans have utilised more resources than produced outcomes and output. This article provides strategies that can facilitate duty holders to emerge as more responsible
actors during the pandemic that continues.
In Gender, Power and Identity: Essays on Masculinities in Rural North India, Prem Chowdhry traces a history of gender relations in pre-colonial times that were defined by consent in marriage as well as sexual liaison. The prevalence of gender-equal choice was due to the demand of labour that during the British fostering inequality.
This humorous delight of a Masculinized hegemony is dismissed by women’s songs that challenge the sexual adequacy of the male, who then seek refuge in body building and indulging in substance abuse.
In the self-curated design of the book cover that is a painting by the author, lived experiences of a number of informants active in civil society, media and the academia have been depicted: A man holding a bamboo staff depicts his combative stature though his expression does not give away emotion, not even through his eyes that seem paralyzed in a puzzled perpetuity. The need to control marital and even sexual liaison led to a crisis faced by men. A women bore the brunt of transgression of caste boundaries—severe punishment even with death—whereas the man was valorized for the number of murders to his credit using a range of weapons. The books analysis of Khap and practices of safeguarding honor, makes it relevant to law, social work scholars as well those studying masculinities as it sees the evolution of gender relations in a particularly reactionary segment of North Indian society.
Forest Protection Committees, the Van Utthan Sansthan
(VUS). In 2003 VUS acquired a formal status as a nongovernmental
organisation that protects and manages
67,000 hectares of forestland in more than 240 villages in
Udaipur, Rajasthan, under Joint Forest Management (JFM).
Today VUS successfully engages with tribal communities
to work together for forest protection by improving
common land and forest resources governance. It has
addressed overgrazing, mining and illegal privatisation of
forestlands. It has also been instrumental for achieving an
increase in livelihood opportunities for communities.
villages of Telangana State, India, transformed 1400 acres
of infertile and idle wasteland into cultivable land using
dryland farming. Realising the potential of the improved
land, the absentee landlords tried to reclaim the land by
threatening the tenants with eviction. Following a
considerable struggle with the landlords, the farmers’
collective, with the support of SDDPA, successfully
negotiated the registration of land in the name of 395
families. The security of tenure for the farmers has
prevented the loss of livelihoods, enhancing agricultural
and environmental sustainability in the area.
Urban planning policies are neither inclusive nor sensitive towards gender based development of urban spaces and services even though currently 31.16% (2011 Census) of Indians are living in cities. In a recent report by Government of India, urban poverty is over 25 percent; some 81 million people live in urban areas on incomes that are below the poverty line. The rapid growth of cities poses distinct challenges for housing, water, sanitation, health, education, social security, livelihoods and the special needs of vulnerable groups such as women, children, and the aging. It is this under served category of people that are impacted by insecure and undefined land tenure system.
The existing culture of permissible and non- permissible spaces and boundaries perpetuates use of violence against those who challenge the differential access to spaces within the city and neighborhood. Urban violence in the public domain amounting to clashes between different groups is often played out in terms of attacks on women. Within the household, family members subjected to domestic violence continue to remain in abusive relationships when they are unable to secure rights to land and property. The household presents complexities developed as a result of differential health status (mental health, aging, disability) of members. Anecdotal evidence from mental health institutions suggests that many women are forcefully evicted from their accommodation on false charges to usurp their property.
Women and girls continue to be poorer than men worldwide and experience greater gender based disparities and difficulty in accessing finance, education, planned services and decision-making opportunities.
It is time to embed gender focused planning at every level of government because women and men use public and private spaces differently and have different concerns about how it meets their needs. Additionally there is imminent need to bridge the gender gap in urban development to mend disparities in opportunity; to build capacity; to manage productive resources; to create safe spaces; and to improve ownership of assets and housing across women and men.
The research and advocacy work done by Sathi All for Partnerships (SAFP) in application of Gender Resource Gap (GRG) differential in planning demonstrates that women are not a homogenous group and therefore have different abilities to manage spaces. Inclusive policies to address gender gap require structured changes in space and law to cater to the needs of “silent” women differentiated by religion, caste, age and abilities across all income levels.
Based on empirical evidence gathered through ground level research by SAFP on GRG as an inclusion strategy, we will share urban poverty reform discourse in India. Some of the key questions we will examine are: how to engender inclusion of GRG gap at various levels of government when determining resources towards infrastructure projects, greening areas and decongestion plans to ensure women and men have equitable access to resources? What policy and support from the government is required for women to manage and maintain private assets, properties and public spaces without experiencing violence?
organizations - Sathi All for Partnership (SAFP) , EqualSaree and Towards Action And Learning (TAAL) (together
known as the SET team) in the two villages of Madhya Pradesh for development of women inclusive resource
zones. The inclusive resource zone encourages special measures that need to be undertaken by women,
government agencies and community groups to build a protective environment for inclusion and promotion of
women in infrastructural development. Woman Resource Zone (WRZ) within an inclusive planning of a local area
redefines conventional planning to address inclusion of men and women equally. Since land use development is
linked to many other local and national resource systems in practice, a system for convergence is required to
identify critical gaps in gender equity and resource requirements to lay claim on budgets controlled by different
government departments. Therefore, coordinated action and response from civil society institutions, women’s
groups, state agencies as well as district, state and central government departments is needed by integrating
policy implementation through WRZ for schemes related to: land policies, water planning and climate adaption
plans based on Food Security Act, Right to Work, Forest Right Act etc. through MNREGA, NRLM and livelihood
initiatives and care needs at the village level. The lessons learned from evaluation of pilots and government
schemes for sustainable development should be used to draw out the possibilities for a gender equal village plan
using the Women Resource Zone (WRZ) as an inclusion mechanism.
This document provides an example of the benefits that could accrue to the tribal and ‘dalit’ communities as a
result of local planning that includes women getting access to land and resources. Initial feedback from the
participants indicates that the Rural WRZ framework developed in Madhya Pradesh has the capacity to: improve
inclusion of women from vulnerable communities, improve land based production and natural resource protection
through local governance. It offers an implementation model for inclusion of the changes that are envisaged in the
recently announced food bill, ban on manual scavenging, land policy as well as the draft land rehabilitation bill
under discussion. However, the work requires more research and linking local groups to district and national
planning and development mechanism to make gender plans work for sustainability at the local level.
Objectives: To map forms in which GRG exist at different levels; to measure the quantum of gender resource gaps; and to propose ways to accommodate GRG at macro and micro levels.
Findings: GRG explored in space, services and spousal income to find that women use and access 31% less space and avail 3% less services on an average.Married men have 130% more income as they have 14% more asset than women.
Gender resource increase options within a local area level plan linked to district planning were explored during the course of the research with experts and members of households. The research demonstrates that cities and villages within a district can be planned to make areas and its inhabitants regenerative. This regenerative plan was termed as a sustainable development zone within which a women resource zone exists. This research proves that balancing inclusion and development is possible. Specific projects could be developed to promote gender equality as a result of this work.
In Gender, Power and Identity: Essays on Masculinities in Rural North India, Prem Chowdhry traces a history of gender relations in pre-colonial times that were defined by consent in marriage as well as sexual liaison. All the essays were published between the period 2005–2015..
The highlight of Gender, Power and Identity is a humorously presented in-depth family history of the author; it is a methodological delight. A cultural context of rural North India is depicted in two essays that trace ideological constructs of patriarchal assertion. Chowdhury also traces alternatives and the wind of change through different historic periods. Masculinized hegemony is dismissed through the mood and messaging of women’s cultural expression.
The geography of masculinities is explained in this book, with an interesting analysis of the retention of shift in power to khap panchayat formed by older upper caste men. Khap power was consolidated during the period when lower caste men got government jobs due to affirmative action and young men occupied the formal or the gram panchayat. In the chapter that places the ‘Crises of Masculinities in Haryana’, the loss of male control over their own destiny is discussed.
Since the essays are placed within the historical formation of trends to record social change together case law, this book will be used by inquisitive lawyers. With its analysis of khap panchayats and practices of safeguarding honour, the book will interest social work scholars as well. Gender relations courses could use Gender, Power and Identity: Essays on Masculinities in Rural North India as a text to understand the emergence of a North Indian masculine discourse. All in all, a very important contributions to gender relations in a particularly reactionary segment of North Indian society.