BehanVox: A Liquor Law That Criminalizes NT-DNT Women
This week in BehanVox: ASHA workers' protest an attendance app, Allahabad High Court's sustained misogyny, and histories of India's women jazz pioneers
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox! This week we bring you two wonderfully reported stories – on a new intrusive attendance app introduced in Maharashtra for ASHA workers and on the indignities heaped on NT-DNT women under the excise act in Madhya Pradesh. That and some interesting news nuggets and recommendations for the weekend.
Story So Far
Vaishali Borade is like a lot of ASHA workers who have to run a household on her subpar “honorarium” as a “volunteer”. You would think that being not designated a government employee despite a tremendous workload would give her the latitude to supplement her earnings with other gigs. After all, she has a sick spouse and a disabled child to provide for.
In fact that is precisely what Vaishali was doing till three months ago. She would go home by 5 pm and then work for an hour as a cook in two households. Around 8 pm she would set up a pop up vada pav stall in the neighbourhood. But in January this year, she had to put a stop to all her extra earnings. For, the Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar city municipal commissioner had introduced a private attendance app Hajeri (meaning attendance) that she, like all ASHA workers in the city, had to mark with photographic evidence of being at work — thrice a day.
To mark attendance, ASHA workers have to now login to the app, select the date and upload a photograph. It requires continuous access to the phone’s files, photos, camera and location.
“We have to mark our attendance in the morning around 9 am, in the afternoon around 2 pm and in the evening around 5-5:30 pm. We have to stay present for a minimum of eight hours. If we do the first attendance at 9:30, we have to wait till 5:30,” said Manasi Vetakar, an ASHA workers’ union leader from the city.
Vaishali can no longer make it to her cooking jobs or manage her vada pav outlet. And to make up for lost earnings, she works the entire night as a nursing attendant, reaching home at the crack of dawn to start the tedium all over again.
The app raises several questions, not the least of which is why volunteers should be expected to clock in office hours. Equally distressing is the fact that the app and its demands are an invasion of the workers’ privacy and one they cannot say no to for fear of losing their jobs.
This is not the first time an app has been introduced to surveil ASHA workers. In May 2021, the Haryana government made ASHA workers install an app called Shield360, intended to monitor daily targets. But the app went beyond and had provisions to monitor real-time movements of ASHA workers and their usage of other apps and the internet. It also allowed officials to remotely add, delete or update any information or mobile applications on the phones.
The app was discontinued after protests from ASHA workers in the state.
Digital solutions to monitor and track workers has been a growing trend in India. In 2020, at least seven municipal corporations in the country had introduced GPS-enabled tracking devices for sanitation workers. One of the main problems with such tech interventions is information asymmetry, said experts. There is a clear power imbalance between the surveillant and the person being surveilled and this power differential makes free consent impossible.
The ASHA workers in Sambhajinagar told our reporter Shreya Raman that they have not received any information on how the data collected from their phones will be processed, who will have access to the data and what kind of pay cuts or consequences they will have to face for not marking the attendance in the application.
A day after we published the story, the municipal commissioner G Sreekanth spoke to us over the phone.The commissioner reasoned that ASHA workers are paid a fixed honorarium and hence they must be monitored. “Yes, they are not regular employees. They are paid a fixed honorarium even if they don’t do anything. [Since] they are paid an honorarium, there should be an action”, he told us.
Read our story here.
Our reporter Priyanka Tupe has been reporting consistently on the many indignities and inequities that nomadic and denotified tribes have to face in every sphere of life. These investigations won her the Kamla Mankekar Award for gender journalism this year.
This week Priyanka reports on an inexplicable gap in the four-year-old heritage liquor policy brought in by the Madhya Pradesh government as a part of its excise act. The policy encourages the brewing and sale of traditional mahua based liquor among the state’s Scheduled Tribes. But the same alcohol is treated as illicit when NT-DNT people make or sell it. This is despite the fact that among both kinds of tribal communities, mahua liquor is a traditional drink with both social and cultural significance.
What is even more harrowing for the community, especially its women, is that offenders are punished with exceptional severity, beaten up, abused, extorted and their materials confiscated, Priyanka reports. This, say the community members and activists, is a throwback to the dark times when they were treated as a criminalised group of people.
Read our story here.
Talking Point
‘Inviting Trouble’: We had in the same space here reported on Supreme Court criticising an Allahabad high court ruling that nitpicked about about difference between “preparing” to rape and “attempting” it. In a ruling that sounded like something straight out of the dark ages, this week the same court said that a survivor had “invited” trouble by accompanying a rapist to his home and must have seen the “moral” implications of her act. The court also included the fact that a virginity test conducted on the survivor strengthened its argument. The idea of consent and the invalidity of the so-called two finger test have clearly held no value for the court.
Transgender Protest: A transgender college student, Marcy Rheintgen, entered a women’s restroom in Florida, declaring “I am here to break the law” and was led out in handcuffs by the police. This was the first arrest that civil rights activists noted for violation of the transgender bathroom restrictions passed by numerous state legislatures across the country.
Inch by Inch: The French parliament is considering a draft law that would institute a “sliding statute” for adult victims of sexual abuse, reports Impact. Survivors whose cases are time-barred could get an extension and still press charges if their abuser is found to have victimised someone else more recently, within the statute of limitations.
BehanVox Recommends
Jazz Queens: Fascinated by the stories of some of India’s women jazz pioneers: Asha Puthli, Pam Crain, Usha Uthup? Here is a tribute.
Tale of a rebel: Sukanya Shantha chronicles the life and death of Gumudavelli Renuka — a journalist, rebel and Maoist — who was killed in a police firing in Bijapur, South Chhattisgarh on March 31.
Feminist futures: On the FemWork podcast, experts Isha Bhallamudi and Sonakshi Agarwal discuss digital gig economies, informal labour and changes that have swept through the Global South over the past decade.
Custody: A story of divorce, abuse, affairs, power abductions — Ezra Wallach documents the story behind the viral, complicated court case between tech billionaire Prasanna Sankar, and Dhivya Sashidhar, that spans countries.
Equity and environment: Aparna Ganesan’s docu-explainer explores the socio-economic impacts of large-scale solar parks on rural, farming communities in Tamil Nadu.
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