This feisty woman from Marathwadais changing the fate of thousands of single women By Aparna Shukla and Yoshita Sengupta Photographs by Manoej Paateel
“I told them to pay our dues or the fire will ruin everything it touches,” saysSunandaBhanudasKharrate dramatically, standing tall, draped in a saree and with bright red sindoor, spread a little above her forehead. She was recalling the mashaal (fire torch) yatra to Osmanabad’scollector’s office,which she led, to demand the unpaid MGNREGA dues of hundreds of single women like her.“When I went there, about 30 guns were pointed at me. This is it for me, I thought,” she claims. “I told the Tehsildaar, ‘If you clear the dues today, the fire will burn out; if you don’t then I can’t guarantee what it will touch and destroy,” she adds. Sunanda for several years worked as a labourer in farms and at MGNREGA projects, before finally joining an Osmanabad-based NGO named Paryaay. Today, the little over-the-top and flamboyant Sunanda is the leader and voice of over 750 single women in Vashi and Kallam in Osmanabad, Maharashtra. In the few years of working with a structured NGO, she has managed to get 1000 aadhar cards and more than 1500 ration cards made for single women, over and above getting them water, MNREGA jobs etc. Her biggest achievement, however, was to lead a three year-long struggle and get the government, for the first time in history, to sanction a separate budget for single women. “The (Rs.) 20 lakh that the government has sanctioned in the latest budget would be utilized to help single women start
small businesses. These women don’t even have houses. They don’t have land on their names and they have children to take care of. It’s about time they get their rights,” she says. A single woman herself, Sunandalost her father at the age of five and has been fending for the family ever since. “I started working as a child. From getting food on the table, to securing the future of my family, I did everything by myself; without a support system,” she says. Her family married her off at the age of 16. However, she never went to live with her in-laws. “My husband would call me and insist that I take a share in my brother’s 30 acre-land. I would be baffled,” she recalls. Why should I take his land? For you? You married me for money, she’d ask him. “Sit, stand up, get me water; we (women) are treated as mere properties. Thatwas not what I wanted; I had decided that at a young age. I didn’t feel the need to depend on anyone, but myself,” says Sunanda, whose husband is now married to another woman and has two kids. Why does she wear a mangalsutra and apply sindoor, we ask? “When I didn’t wear the sindoor or the mangalsutra or these two dozen green bangles, men would look at me like I’m a food item. When I would sit in the bus, men, as old as 80, would touch me inappropriately. I endured all of that. It’s very dirty and it’s something that is never going to change. No matter how many more Sunandas come and go. I have decided to be what they want me to be and fight the system from within. My only agenda is to make single women stand on their own feet and I will continue to work towards it all my life,” she signs off.