Kuteera - Shelter for Women in DistressThe years of our work with issues related to domestic and personal violence that took an institutional form with Angala, the crisis centre in 1993 further led to the setting up of a women’s shelter in 2001 in the district of Kolar, about 60 kms away from the city of Bangalore.
Why the shelter
The decision to locate the shelter in a rural community came from two needs identified in the course of our work. Firstly, the daily work with issues related to personal violence. This included the counseling work in Angala and the Campaign on Dowry Violence and Unnatural Deaths of Women that highlighted the desperate need to provide a safe space to which women can retreat from the immediacy of violence in their homes that could be suicidal or homicidal. Secondly this project was also conceived as an extension of and connecting with the other areas of work of Vimochana and CIEDS particularly related to our work with rural communities. [Link with community organising and convention and training centre]
While there do exist a range of institutions and shelters that cater to the need for a safe space, each functions with its own limitation and logic. Some have a limited time frame within which they are forced to reach a settlement so that the woman can be sent back; many do not allow the woman to stay with her child; some have their religious affiliations that force the women to submit to the rigidity of their practices. We felt the need to create a space for women that would understand and be responsive to the specific vulnerabilities of their situation; a space in which they could heal and refind their strengths to reject the violence in their lives, to renegotiate the terms for their continued marital life or to perhaps learn to live independently. In our perspective however, the women would grow not only in the physical confines of the shelter but in relation to a larger community in the context of which the shelter would be located. Therefore the links between the shelter and the community organising that we are doing in the villages and towns around Vemgal where we are based.
We also decided to locate it on a larger area of land that would be a source of self sustenance for us to the maximum extent possible – both in terms of some food as also some income. There are therefore three dimensions of our work in this women’s shelter and rural centre of Vimochana / CIEDS Collective:
a. the shelterb. working with the wider community in which we are located through networking, building support groups and offering training workshops on violence against women
c. attempting to maximise the utilisation of additional land and infrastructure through organic cultivation and through generating additional income by extending the facilities of the training centre to other groups
With these as the primary objectives the shelter cum training centre became operational from December 2001.Providing Refuge and Seeking Resolution
The shelter, over the past years of existence in Kolar has established itself as a reference point for women in distress and victims of personal and domestic violence in the district. Apart from referrals from Bangalore where our work is based, because of our presence in Kolar and continued public interventions and programmes, many organisations and members of the public, including the police and the media send us women who need the kind of shelter and support that Kuteera has been able to extend. So far up until 2005, about 300 women with different kinds of problems have come and stayed in the shelter for various lengths of time and have had their problems addressed and resolved.
As is the process, we initially provide them with emotional and moral support reassuring them that this is a safe space that will give them the security from where they can decide about how they want their life to go forward. For when women come to us initially they are too shattered to make any decisions. The next step is that of reaching out to their partners and the concerned family. In many cases we involve the local panchayat (a culturally evolved community based dispute resolving mechanism with village elders based on the principle of nyaya – justice) in the process of attempting to resolve the issues and to ensure community support for the women for she cannot go back to a situation where she once again gets isolated and vulnerable.
If we are not able to peacefully resolve the issue and the situation is potentially more violent, we seek the assistance of the police when we either do police panchayats (dispute resolution with the police also as a part of the community) or we go ahead to register a case and then follow it up in the court. We have also been able to place women in jobs, particularly in the factories around where we have established some contact.
In the period that the women spend in the shelter in order to divert their minds from their immediate situations, activities like meditation, tailoring, knitting, painting and craft training are provided.
Community Organising
Apart from counseling and following up on the problems of individual women who come to the shelter, we also naturally began working in the villages around our shelter and found the potential to organise women around the issues that concern them in their immediate realities. We organised meetings in these villages separately which culminated in joint meetings at our centre. The discussions revolved around the different forms of violence against women, awareness about related laws and possible responses to violence.
To extend this work to the villages where we did not have direct contact, we initiated work with the self help group (SHGs) leaders in the area by organising meetings every second Saturday. These leaders are in regular contact with us and participate in all our seminars. They act as a bridge to reach the village women. This has resulted in the formation of a network with members / representatives from 10 villages with every village having two groups comprising of 20 women each. This network helps us to hold panchayats in the villages to hear cases of harassment, desertion etc. with a view to finding solutions outside of the legal system. We hope to systematise this through the Mahila Nyaya Panchayats we plan to initiate. [Link]
Apart from this network, a support group for women above 45 years has been formed called Gnani Ajjigalu (wise elderly women). Women of this age often feel sidelined, lonely and unproductive, so the group is a space for them to gain confidence, feel supported and share their lives with other women in similar situations.
Living of the Land
From the beginning we have focused on making the land around the shelter cultivable and productive without the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, providing a model for organic cultivation for the farmer communities around.
The land at Kolar being very rocky and the water tables receding gives rise to the problem of lack of water especially for cultivation. However with our hard and strenuous efforts we have not only made the land ready for cultivation through indigenous techniques of water resource management that have almost disappeared with the advent of commercialisation of agriculture but made it productive through using methods of organic cultivation. We have succeeded in not only growing vegetables like onion, tomato, potato, beans, chillies, etc. which supplemented the shelters daily needs but also good yields of Ragi, the staple food of Karnataka, paddy and cereal. This was an effort that was very much appreciated by the neighbouring farmer friends.
Our efforts at organic farming have influenced the farmers around the shelter to shift their own modes of cultivation. With this as the model we have sought to reach out systematically to the village women and men farmers to inspire them to cultivate their land using organic farming methods. In our awareness programmes in the villages around we give detailed information on the evils of inorganic cultivation that has infected our agricultural practices with disastrous consequences to our survival systems - both economic and biological. For not only is this an unsustainable system as the farmer’s suicides have shown but also poisonous considering the amount of toxins we are introducing into our food systems that eventually destroys the health of the community.
Over the coming years, we plan to deepen our own efforts at this kind of cultivation as also in collaboration with groups like Green Foundation, that are working with large communities of farmers on organic cultivation, reintroduce into the communities that we are involved with, the concept of community seed banks. This will not only help us to bring long term changes in the cropping patterns but also revive the traditional system of storing and using local seed varieties that can be used without pesticides and chemical manure.
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