The Process of CWLR so far

Since the last two years members of the Consult for Women and Land Rights (CWLR) are working actively in their respective areas towards developing the human resource to take on the work on women and land in different states in India. The Indian members enrolled CWLR membership in other countries such that similar processes could begin in other places as well. These include, Camille Narayan, Vasavi, Jarjume Ete, Tanushree Verma, Seema Khot, Shivani Bhardwaj, Geeta Govil and R Geetha The members out side India got together at Bangladesh, Nepal, ICARRD in Brasil and at WUF in Vancouver and have planned the WSF Kenya process with the secretariat. These included Jagat Basnet, Md. Hilal, Camille Narayan, Shivani Chaudhary, Nitya Rao, Joy Nagwakwe and Sebina Zziwa,

Members like the WSC, WGWLO, GLRF, Maati, Bhumi Adhikar Manch and the CWLR executive committee related to the work on women and land at multi level. It not only created the willingness to work on the issue with 10 local village and 3 urban groups but also helped setting up of four state level networks in Uttrakhand Jharkhand, UP and Bihar. The networks will now be developed further to deal with the issue at all levels from local to state. For this the secretariat staff organized several programs such that women and men could work together to discover different facet of work on women and land. For membership list see CWLR brochure or visit CWLR website.

CWLR recommendations were drafted as the outcome of the efforts developed by different people at the academic and community level. These people include community women gathered at local level workshops at Manickpur, Allahbad, Sahebganj, Pakur, Gairsen, Timli, Sahaspur, Chennai, Ranchi, Patna, Luckhnow and Delhi. Their concerns were wetted and refined by Seema Khot, Roma, Jarjume Ete, Vasavi, Malika Virdi, WGWLO, R. Geetha, Nitya Rao, Priti Darooka, Sidamma, Praveer Peter, N. Geetha, Babu Mathew, Arundhati R Chaiudhry, Bina Agarwal, Miloon Kothari, Soma Parthasarthy, Pam Rajpoot, Vinay Bhardwaj, Subhash Bhatngar, Rehana Khan, Sona Khan, Vidya Rawat, Indu Agnihotri, Sabiha, Anita Soni, Dunu Roy, Jyostna Chatterjee, Rajni Tilak, Jill Carr Harris, Manju Dung Dung, Suman Jana, Sister Sheeba, Safiya Zameer, Hem Gairolla, Kamala Panth, Feroza Mehrotra and Govind Kelkar. The recommendations were presented to different ministries and placed for consideration of civil society movement leaders. This work was to initiate a process to build a willingness to commit to this work. Successful consultations with different stakeholders were held to set aside land and resources for women from the marginalised groups. A list of 68 events is recorded and placed at the CWLR web site for all to view.

To assert community women’s claim to land CWLR demands an increase in rural women's ownership of land, resources and productive assets through radical agrarian reforms. The key to the agrarian and land reform agenda is a gender just redistribution of land along with transforming anti- women laws, policies and unequal social and economic relations. The context has been built in eight states of India and in 11 countries by people signing up as members of CWLR. State and village level proposals are ready for support from Sahyog legal, Soup, Mamta Samajick Sansthan, Saheli Adhyan Kendra, Women Struggle Committee, Ekta Parishad, Adithi, Prayas, Disha, Social Development foundation, Chotanagpur vikas Sansthan and Sathi all for partnerships. Ajalaa a project has been conceived by Jyostsana Chatterjee, Anila Emanuel to create women’s space in the city master plans.

2

The CWLR’s work spanned from state level to international level. The need to engage people at all levels simultaneously was experienced through programs organised by the members of CWLR with the secretariat linking of work at different level is seemly getting a level of synergy. Thus work now is ready for take off in urban areas as well rural areas.

Today CWLR is known among UN Agencies like UNDP, IFAD, UNIFEM, UN Habitat, the civil society and government agencies in India. In course of CWLR work interactions have taken place with the following stakeholders: Women’s Groups Networks, Land rights and housing rights groups like Via Campesina, Habitat International Coalition, Water Rights Network, Food Security Network, Asia Pacific Women Watch, APWLD, India Women Watch, Ekta Parishad, Sanjha Manch, Narmada Bachao Andolan, National Campaign Committee of the Unorganized Sector Workers, WGWLO, Olakh, NAPM, WOSCA etc. The members have interacted with organizations that could support the work for event-based activity to meet expenses for travel and programs for lobbying government and civil society. These include Ministries of the Indian government, Government of Japan and funding organizations like Action Aid, HBF, ICCO and Global Fund for Women that supported travel for lobby events, National Commission for Women and National Planning Commission that supported hearings and consultations for advocacy, IWID and Indo Global Social Service Society that supported costs towards workshops on women and land.

The CWLR yahoo groups keeps all members informed of the updates. We are thankfull to Ms D leena that she set this group up and maintains the communication. Ms Geeta Govil, Samreen Usmani and Abhilash Verghese manage the CWLR web site. Members are requested to log on to this multilingual web site and add to it materials they ay like all to view. This task could not have been done without the support of Ms N. Geetha of OWSA.