- Contributions to Indian Sociology (CIS)
"NGO means business [byabsha] and theft [churi]. But within this, there
is also change. Today, some village girls are able to say that they need
to stand on their own feet, go out, and not just think within the limits
of the household."
Sumana illustrated with characteristic clarity, the paradoxes of the work
of NGOs. Their self-presentation as ‘do-gooders’—especially for poor rural
women like her—obfuscated the extent to which the development sector operated
as a business with the intrinsic possibility of being corrupt and exploitative.
At the same time, her words underscored what we also know to be a truism from
critical ethnographies of gender and development, namely that governmental and
non-governmental interventions do create a potential for change and that too,
in the agents of development rather than in its intended beneficiaries.
Sumana—whose story is not the subject of this article (but of another)—was one such agent called upon
to deliver the goods of development in a globally resonant and deeply gendered
mode. She had managed, in a short period of time, to rapidly rise up the ranks
of Kolkata’s development sector, becoming a well-known gender trainer for
various city-based women’s NGOs as well as sustaining a small funded outfit in
her village of origin while living in the metropole. Still occupying an
economically precarious position—sustained through piecemeal external funds and
payments for her services—she nevertheless cut an aspirational figure for some
of the women around her. These were rural, working-class, lower-caste, poorly educated
women, employed as caseworkers and peer educators, in the lowest rungs of a
sector that was itself marked by low, insecure pay, and the lack of benefits.
One of them was a caseworker who I will call Ruma, who invariably compared
herself to Sumana, complaining how the latter had accrued more recognition and
respect from NGO didis (elder sisters) than she had but also clarifying the
distinct nature of her own aspirations. These were far more modest than running
an NGO. Ruma simply desired a salary to continue doing what she loved, which
she described as helping or even ‘saving’ women from oppression. Individual
aspiration of this sort embodied several of the contradictions when it came to
the twin processes of the restructuring of women’s development under
neoliberalism and the NGOisation of feminist activism. In this article, I dwell
on the paradox of producing precarity in the name of empowerment by showing how
NGOs can, on the one hand, offer employment opportunities to women who are
otherwise outside of the labour market but can, on the other hand, ensconce
them in new forms of precarity, particularly in offering up forms of
(feminised) labour that are almost exclusively insecure, poorly paid, and
short-term—or, precarious. Such precarity exceeded
questions of pay. Women like Ruma desired salaries as clear indicators of their
self-worth and value beyond the economic. It was ultimately precarious NGO
work—invariably referred to by individual women as a bhalo kaaj (a good
deed)—that generated such new aspirations that were tied to specific classed
and gendered futures, thereby drawing our attention to another set of
paradoxes, namely the manner in which empowerment-induced-precarity was the
locus of not just new aspirations but fostered in subaltern women new
capacities to aspire.
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