The warp and weft of Ahmedabad

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Interviews with Mirai Chatterjee, Director of Social Security, SEWA and Jayshree Lalbhai, Educationist and Trustee by Harmony Siganporia.

IN looking at Ahmedabad, it is important to reckon with some of the grand ideas and institutions which have given the city its colour and flavour – the places, people, and movements that endow the city with its own very particular character. Two such ideas, animating and straddling almost diametrically different sections of Ahmedabad’s society and economy, are to be encountered in the form of SEWA and the Gandhian notion of ‘trusteeship’. However, both these visions are deeply connected, not just by Ahmedabad or because Gandhi happens to be at the root of both. They speak to each other philosophically because each stems from a firm belief in a world premised on equality and justice, entailing the sharing of wealth and prosperity to mitigate inequality.

The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) was founded by Ela Bhatt in 1972, and organizes women workers who are a part of the informal economy. With 1.5 million women members, SEWA is the largest union of informal workers in the world, and one of the largest non-profit organizations in India.

Trusteeship, on the other hand, is the Gandhian doctrine proposed as an antidote to the economic inequalities of ‘ownership and income’, a nonviolent method of ‘resolving all (the) social and economic conflicts,’1 which arise out of the schism between those who have and those who have not. As Gandhi put it, trusteeship would become possible if ‘moneyed men may earn their crores (honestly only, of course) but so as to dedicate them to the service of all.’2

Mirai Chatterjee, SEWA’s Director of social security, and Jayshree Lalbhai, Director of Rachana School and board member/trustee of several city-based institutions working in education and development, were interviewed separately between 29 April and 1 May 2018 in Ahmedabad.

Miraiben is responsible for SEWA’s childcare, health care and insurance programmes, and has worked with the organization in various capacities since 1984, including as its General Secretary after Elaben (Bhatt). When asked about the relationship between SEWA and Ahmedabad, the city of its birth, she suggested that it was no coincidence that it is in this city that this trade union that promotes the rights of low-income, self-employed female workers was born. ‘Ahmedabad is a humming, buzzing locus of enterprise, and always has been so. It is not surprising that this is where Elaben set about founding this organization,’ she says. Making a case for the aptness of Ahmedabad for such an initiative, Miraiben cites the examples offered by Anasuya Sarabhai and her engagement with Fabian Socialism (a pioneer of the women’s labour movement in India. Anasuyaben founded the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association or Majoor Mahajan Sangh in 1917), and Gandhi’s own engagement with worker and labour issues, making the case that these ideas were never marginal to the city’s core imagination.

Anasuyaben is perhaps best remembered for going up against her mill-owner brother, Ambalal Sarabhai, over the issue of an increase in wages for mill workers who went on strike in 1918. Coming close on the heels of the Champaran satyagraha, this strike, in which Gandhi served as mediator between workers and owners finding some measure of cause with both sides, was an important marker in his trajectory as a public figure. Miraiben cites this episode as an important moment in the history of the Indian labour movement, suggesting that it also had a very important and direct bearing on Ahmedabad, ultimately serving as a precursor to SEWA’s own organizing of workers, making it obvious that the union is heavily inspired by Gandhian thinking and action.

‘Since Ahmedabad was a textile hub, the most appropriate metaphor for SEWA within it is that the organization has come to be woven into the warp and weft of the city. Elaben says that it is the workers of this city who opened her eyes to the informal economy. It was here that she met head-loaders and women pulling haath-laris (hand-lorries) in the city’s main textile market, and they told her that they were carrying tremendous loads and working long hours, all for a wage of 50 paise a day. They could not make ends meet. She realized that the only way things would change was if the women learnt to organize themselves, and strike from work. After that first foray into organizing for the informal sector, she was approached by beedi makers and other workers in the informal urban economy. This was the backdrop against which SEWA was conceived, and there’s no doubt that Ahmedabad is the organization’s karmabhumi.

This city is known for its entrepreneurs, and that’s exactly what these women workers were: they were entrepreneurial and doughty. They taught Elaben that their world and work were very different from that of their menfolk; their challenges were unique, which meant that the solutions to them would have to be as well,’ she explains. Thus it was that a separate union was registered for these women in the form of SEWA, in 1972.

‘When we began this journey, roughly 80% of the workforce in India was part of the informal economy, with all the vulnerability that this existence entails. That number has increased to over 93% in India, and currently stands at around 77% in Ahmedabad alone, according to a study conducted by Jeemol Unni and Uma Rani3 a few years ago,’ says Miraiben. She explains that this number includes women involved in a range of occupations: from home-based workers who might be involved in the production of everything from beedis and agarbattis to, increasingly, garments and food, and from manual labourers, construction workers, sanitation workers, and domestic workers to waste recyclers – ‘SEWA sisters’ are thus involved in a gamut of economic activities designed and brought to pass owing to their resolve and enterprise.

‘As someone who came to Ahmedabad from Mumbai decades ago, one of the things that really stood out to me about the city was that there was a sense of frugality and simplicity I think is intrinsic to the city’s sense of itself. Coupled with its long history of philanthropy and the Gandhian notion of trusteeship, these ideals are the catalysts for what is often thought of as Ahmedabad’s "entrepreneurial ethos",’ she holds. ‘People here don’t wait for someone to come and help them – they are risk takers, not averse to taking a shot in the dark. One such risk was the formation in 1974 of the Swashrayi Mahila Sewa Sahakari Bank,’ she cites, by way of example. This bank, the first of its kind in India, is owned by the self-employed women, as shareholders. Miraiben remembers that upon being turned down for loans from conventional banks, one of the SEWA sisters, Chandaben Jagaria, had this to tell Elaben: ‘We are poor, but we are many,’ indicating that the answer to their conundrum for funding might well lie within and not outside the organization. What followed was the setting up of the bank, with 4000 members each contributing 10 rupees as share capital. Today, there are over 5,00,000 active depositors, and the bank has working capital of over 300 crore rupees.

When I flipped the question I started with over, now asking Miraiben what SEWA had brought to the complex character of Ahmedabad, her response was almost instant: ‘We have shown the city, but more, the country, and the world, that there is a way to reduce poverty; that women of every caste/class/religion and socio-economic location can come together, be united and have their own enterprises, like cooperatives. Nothing comes in their way if they decide to work towards self-reliance and achieving swaraj. We have put Ahmedabad onto the map, globally, as a major hub for those thinking through or working on informal workers movements, and radiated out to our neighbouring countries as well, with sister organizations in Nepal, Pakistan and across South-East Asia.

‘We have always organized women around work and livelihoods, across class, caste, religious and other markers which traditionally serve to separate us. An example of this is to be found in the model for our "Parivartan Programme". This programme attempts to bring together the AMC (Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation), SEWA members, and Employers, as one group in Ahmedabad. We jointly devised a list of seven basic services, including the installation of water connections, streetlights, clean streets et cetera (much before the Swacch Bharat Abhiyan was ever conceived), which were meant to help communities transform their low-income neighbourhoods. The idea was to solicit contributions from all three sections, so that everyone felt invested in the process of transforming their surroundings. This is a model for urban partnerships, and one we are committed to realizing. As one of our SEWA sisters said gleefully of the initiative, "aa to society jevu bani gayu!" (our areas have become like housing societies!).

‘Another example of this sort of partnership cutting across sectarian divides is in the form of a recent initiative where SEWA has tied up with FICCI’s (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) women’s wing, full of successful women entrepreneurs. We know that both groups have much they can learn from each other. I honestly believe that SEWA is one of the only places where people can come together in these times, to overcome the many divisions which otherwise threaten to rent the fabric of our society. Why? Because this is their organization, an entity entirely of their own making,’ she concludes.

To draw out and build on the notion of ‘trusteeship’ that Miraiben alluded to in passing, I next interviewed Jayshree Lalbhai to try and understand what this concept might mean in practice today. What was the spirit that animated the activities and projects of the various trusts established in and for Ahmedabad by those who had loved her and called her home for generations past? And this very clear cognisance of legacy is precisely what Jayshreeben begins our interview by alluding to. ‘Ours is the third generation post-Independence to be doing what we do in Ahmedabad, and it would not be amiss to suggest that it has been largely its business community that has given Ahmedabad its character. These business families gave the city many of its most prolific and exciting institutions, through their involvement in education. Examples abound with Gautam and Gira Sarabhai being instrumental in setting up NID (the National Institute of Design), or Vikram Sarabhai’s exertions which brought IIM-A (the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad), ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), PRL (Physical Research Laboratory) and scores of other institutions to the city, or Kasturbhai Lalbhai, who was the main force behind the setting up of the Ahmedabad Education Society (AES), LD College of Engineering, LD Institute and Museum of Indology and others. The business community rallied together to create and gift these institutions to Ahmedabad: everyone contributed to the AES for example, in the firm belief that this was a step towards creating a more equitable and prosperous society and, therefore, an investment in the future of the city,’ she says.

Apart from the educational institutions, the business community was also responsible for inviting architects like Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Charles Correa and others to the city, Jayshreeben reminds us, affording Ahmedabad a brush with a certain kind of Modernist sensibility which still punctuates its visual idiom, creating a language all its own as it retains but reinterprets the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’. This was also, to her mind, an extension of the duties incumbent upon the ‘trustees’ of the city, to ensure that they tended her legacy but also brought her into the present, and set her up for the future. ‘It is our job not only to keep the trusts and institutions our forebears created alive, but I view it as our primary responsibility to tend closely to the spirit in which they were envisioned, because it is this that brimmed with vitality. Over the decades, these institutions have accrued immense value literally and metaphorically; value that has been created here, in the ways in which they have served the city herself, and not individual entities within it. It is this notion of creating and maintaining discernible "public good" that I feel we are charged with.’

The order of the day, Jayshreeben categorically outlines, is to find and appoint the ‘right people’ in positions of authority; people ‘strong enough’ to continue tending the flame. And are these ‘right people’ necessarily to come from the same handful of business families that have bestowed its institutions upon the city? ‘Not at all – it could be anybody, from anywhere, as long as they have the strength and vision to lead and shape the city of the future. What is Ahmedabad? Or what is any city, for that matter? A combination of its tangible heritage – its architecture, its institutions – and its people. And how does one build the city of the future? By investing in the present; by creating educational institutions with heart that empower the children of today, for they are the citizenry of tomorrow. Our institutions need to remember that theirs is a purpose of the highest order. If they become short-sighted or begin to think of themselves as businesses, something intensely precious would be lost in the process. To remain relevant to Ahmedabad, as well as in and of themselves, institutions need autonomy to design and execute their own curricula for example, and most importantly, they need to be reflexive enough to constantly question and challenge themselves,’ she believes.

And what have her ‘trustees’ bequeathed Ahmedabad? ‘A legacy of giving, not merely taking from the city,’ is Jayshreeben’s immediate response. ‘Power is not the same as purpose, and if creating and nurturing the institutions that will give the city its generations to come were premised merely upon attempts to wrest power, something would be painfully amiss. Our attempt remains, therefore, to never lose sight of what the founders of these institutions intended: to build organizations which were forward facing, even as they retained their moorings in the moral compass afforded by their roots in the ideas of trusteeship and generating public welfare,’ she says. ‘Every generation of trustees finds itself facing new responsibilities, which are in response to a changing society. For instance, one of our main concerns at the LD Institute of Indology at the moment is the digitization of our archive. But in all we do and strive towards, the bid remains to make sure that we leave these institutions built with so much love and effort better than we found them, so they continue to serve the city and have a role to play in the shape of things to come.’

 

Footnotes:

1. Y. Kesavulu, ‘Gandhian Trusteeship as an "Instrument of Human Dignity",’ Gandhi Marg 25(4), January-March 2004.

2. M.K. Gandhi, Harijan, 22 February 1942.

3. G. Standing, Jeemol Unni, R Jhabvala and Uma Rani, Social Income and Insecurity: A Study in Gujarat, 2012. 1-232. 10.4324/9780203085479. For more, see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288402371Social_income_and_insecurity_ A_study_in_Gujarat (last accessed on 5 May 2018).

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