Gamechangers: The All-Women Gram Panchayats of Uttarakhand
Many villages in this Himalayan state have had their fortunes turned around by all-woman Gram Panchayats.
Manju Bora of Jinkhola, a village in Uttarakhand’s Kumaon region, proudly bears a double distinction: not only is she the first female Pradhan (elected chief) of the village but also heads the first all-woman Gram Panchayat there. The feisty 38-year-old is one of the 35,177 elected women representatives in the 7,485 panchayats of Uttarakhand, which has the distinction of being among those states that boast the most women in their Gram Panchayats.
Like the other women of Jinkhola, Manju leaves home at 4 am, and heads under a shroud of darkness to her fields to cut and gather the October harvest along with hundreds of other women across the Kumaon region. Unlike them, however, she is back home by 6 am to clean her one-bedroom house and make breakfast and lunch for her two children before starting her day as the Gram Panchayat Pradhan.
With her husband away working in Dubai, Manju operates like a single mother. Few job opportunities in the region, especially high paying ones, have pushed all the able-bodied men of Jinkhola village to migrate to Dubai for work leaving behind women, children and the elderly. Others have migrated to Delhi and Mumbai.
“I attend to everything single-handedly, including taking care of my home and my children and carrying out my duties as Pradhan simultaneously. Today I will be distributing seeds of wheat to the women in the village,’’ said Manju.
On this particular day, Manju has called for a Mahila Sabha at the ‘Panchayat Ghar’ or the Gram Panchayat office building. The Mahila Sabha is a subset of the Gram Sabha, exclusively for women, where women voters gather to discuss the issues that they often find difficult to raise during the Gram Sabha meetings in presence of men.
“Members of the Gram Panchayat, the all-woman Van Panchayat (a statutory village body that manage and protect forests) and a Mahila Samuh (women’s self-help group) that I set up in the three villages under me in the Jhinkola Gram Panchayat will attend,” said Manju, who is wearing a special steel-grey saree with a green leheriya border for the occasion.
Manju recounted how, when her husband returned from his job in Dubai during the Covid-19 pandemic, he started taking decisions on projects that she had sanctioned in the Gram Panchayat. “After two months of this, I told him not to interfere in my work. I gave him Rs 10,000 from my own savings and sent him out again,” she said, adding with a laugh, “It has been two years since he left. He is due to come back home now. He told me before leaving, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll come back after your tenure is over.”
Uttarakhand will hold its next panchayat elections in early 2025.
The Jinkhola Panchayat Ghar is located atop the hill where Jhinkola village stands, overlooking a small Golu Devta temple (a local Kumaon deity) and adjacent to a large imposing Banj oak tree.
To reach the building, one would earlier have to go through the temple courtyard. Since menstruating women are not socially permitted to walk through the temple courtyard, the all-woman Gram Panchayat got a separate path carved out, circumventing the temple altogether, so that the women could go to the Gram Panchayat office whenever they needed.
Most of the 30-odd women attendees are late for the Mahila Sabha, as they routinely scramble to finish harvesting and their household chores before venturing out. Manju begins the meeting by briefing them on the last Gram Sabha meeting and discussions held in it on the need to conduct a Bal Sabha (Children’s Council). “We have to decide what kind of schemes we need for children,” she tells the women.
The Pradhan then distributes certificates to the beneficiaries of the PM Vishwakarma Yojana, a central government scheme launched to provide support to artisans and crafts persons to access collateral free credit and skill training. The last eight women of the 70 pushed by Manju to be part of the scheme, will now receive their certificates for training in embroidery and tailoring. All will now receive priority lending when they want to start a business.
Manju tells them that they need to look beyond embroidery for business opportunities. “We have Rs 1.5 lakh in our village kitty to support this,” she said. “We could buy raw materials and decide what to make—jams, incense sticks, diyas, (oil lamps) and even home décor items made from pirul (pine tree leaves). If we had planned well ahead, we could have used the upcoming Diwali celebrations to increase our income.”
The distribution of 25 quintals of wheat seeds then begins—registers are brought out, and the names of recipients are noted along with the names of their villages and Aadhar Card numbers.
As one of the more active panchayat heads in the area, Manju has kept constant communication with the agriculture department, sending groups of women out to learn new agriculture techniques, getting seeds to grow lentils and vegetables and even higher-yielding crop varieties—the villages now grow red rice which fetches them Rs 50 per kilogramme as opposed to the earlier rice which would sell for Rs 15 per kilogramme. Manju’s next priority is to get the village women to make sanitary napkins.
Meeting over, Manju’s work is still not finished. She now has to rush back home to make tea for the labourers constructing a new Anganwadi at the village school, which she has commissioned through Gram Panchayat funds.
“Women elected representatives have a much larger burden of responsibilities than men who are elected,” said Manju.
Reservation For Women
The seed of women panchayats was sown in 1992 when the government, to address the socio-cultural and historic imbalances in Indian society and politics, introduced the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act. The Act, which proposed the reservation of one-third of electoral seats for women in Panchayati Raj Institutions, was implemented a year later.
In 2009, the Constitution (110th Amendment) Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha to increase reservation for women from one-third (33%) to half (50%) of the total seats in three-tier Panchayats. The Bill was never passed. Nevertheless, many states decided to implement 50% reservation for women in Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) by revising the state Panchayat Acts.
Bihar became the first state in the country to implement 50% reservation in 2006, followed two years later by Sikkim. In 2008, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand also introduced the 50% reservation. India is currently ranked as having the highest participation of women in local governance with 1.45 million women in these roles.
Kailash Giri, Assistant Development Officer (Panchayat) of the Garur block in Bageshwar district of Uttarakhand, said that the 50% reservation had been instrumental in taking women out of their homes and into public spaces. “The situation today is such that the women feel confident enough to travel alone,” he said. “They are able to put forth their opinions, strengthening the Panchayat system.”
The system, however, is not without its challenges. “Despite the reservation, there are numerous Gram Panchayats with elected female heads or members, where the women are still hesitant about coming forward,” said Giri.
“They use the excuse of household chores to not turn up for meetings and send the men instead. There is a provision in the Act to remove women members if their male relatives assume control of the post. But I haven’t seen this being done.”
Renu Thakur, the head of the non-profit ARPAN (Association for Rural Planning and Action) who has worked on women empowerment in Uttarakhand for 30 years, agreed with Giri that despite the strides made by women in local governance, cases of pradhan patis (husbands who operate as proxies for their elected spouses) can still be found.
“As a matter of fact, most women who stand for these local elections have been encouraged to do so by their husbands and families—since posts come with an income as well as the power to control the infrastructure development in villages,” she said. “However, we have also found that once the women get these posts, they find their voice and become powerful leaders.”
Thakur added that over the past five to ten years, she had seen a steady decline in the number of pradhan patis. “Women have started claiming their place in public spaces, especially in villages where male out-migration is high,” she said. “I have also seen a new crop of women leaders emerging. They are young, ambitious and educated, and do not wait for women’s quotas any longer. They fight from unreserved seats—and because they are educated and bright, they command respect and are being voted in.”
Hema Negi (26) is one such woman. While she did contest from a seat reserved for women—from the Pachisi Gram Panchayat in Almora district in 2019—she became one of the youngest Pradhans in the region. The soft-spoken young woman, who has a BA degree in political science, economics and Hindi, emphasised that health and education were the two most important issues for her.
“I fought to keep the neighbourhood government school open when the number of students dropped to just four during the Covid-19 pandemic,” she said. “I would go from house to house and convince parents to enrol their children or keep them in the school. By the end of the pandemic, some children had dropped out altogether, while others had been enrolled in a nearby private school. I convinced the parents that they would save money by sending their children to the government school and assured them that we would ensure good teachers.”
The school today has 40 students.
Hema has also got her father to donate a small plot of land to build an Anganwadi, a place where the nutritional needs of pregnant women and new mothers and their babies are looked after under a government scheme to ward off malnutrition and strengthen the children’s mental faculties.
While women’s participation in Gram Sabhas is growing stronger, Kamala Bhatt, the Uttarakhand state in-charge of The Hunger Project, a non-profit that has helped establish 13 all-women panchayats in Kumaon, said there were several challenges that had to be surmounted initially while dealing with the patriarchal mindset.
“We started working with communities so that they could support their women,” she said. “Before the 73rd amendment and the reservation of the state Panchayat acts, women didn’t even come out (of their homes and villages). We told them that now that they had the opportunity, they needed to grab it, learn the work and perform—and we would help them with it. In the beginning, they could not even speak publicly, and we had to train them.”
Bhatt also found that unlike male Panchayat heads and members, women tended to focus on social issues, particularly those related to women and children, alongside the usual infrastructure development.
For instance, Hema Negi said that she learned about the concept of domestic violence because of her training with the Hunger Project. “Even in our village, we’re used to seeing men sometimes come home drunk and misbehave,” she said. “Now I hold meetings not only with the women but also the men, trying to explain to them why this is wrong. I also tell them that if I hear of repeat incidents, I will have to take strict action against them. Domestic violence cases have now reduced.”
Migration And Women Panchayats
The out-migration from Uttarakhand has been so alarming that the state government in 2017 set up the Rural Development and Migration Prevention Commission. Almora is one of the two districts in the state, which has not only seen the highest out-migration but a negative decadal growth of -1.28%, a recent report of the Commission has found.
Based on a survey conducted in 2018, a report released in 2023 by the Commission says that between 2008 and 2018, as many as 3,83,726 residents from 6,338 Gram Panchayats were temporary migrants (keeping their homes in the state but migrating for work). Another 118,981 people from 3,946 Gram Panchayats permanently migrated out of the state.
While Pauri Garhwal district has the highest number of total migrations in Uttarakhand, Almora district has the highest number of temporary migrations, with 53,611 leaving for work. Almora has the second highest total migrations at 69,818 out-migrations, with unemployment being the primary reason for migration, the report says.
Of the 750 inhabitants of the three villages that fall under the Naag Qwerali Gram Panchayat in Almora district, only 150 actually reside here. Most of the men have migrated out, many taking their families along. It is the women who run the villages in their absence.
Even otherwise, women have taken primary responsibility for farming in Kumaon, right from the British era when many men were enlisted in the British Indian army’s Kumaon regiment and the rest migrated.
“The women of Uttarakhand are its backbone,” said Kamala Bhatt. “They are responsible for all the work in the hills. They do everything from domestic chores and looking after livestock to collecting wood for fuel to working in the fields.”
Now, with an all-woman Gram Panchayat in place, the dependence on men in these villages has reduced further. “Even when they were here, they did very little work,” the Gram Panchayat women said.
The Hunger Project has been active in Uttarakhand for many years. Ruchi Yadav, who works with the organisation, pointed out that in 2001, they leveraged the opportunity of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment, focussing on training and empowering elected women representatives across 14 states. The scope of their work, across six states, has now expanded to include all women citizens, communities and male elected representatives as well in a few states.
In the early 2000s, nobody else was doing such work,” said Yadav. “Many women entering local governance at the time were untutored, untrained and uninformed about Panchayats. There was also the issue of self-doubt. We started off with women’s leadership workshops. In 2012-13, we facilitated the Jagruk Manch as a citizen platform that mobilised and helped women in Panchayats to become informed and active citizens in local governance.”
Yadav pointed out that with the increasing migration of men folk in Uttarakhand, the Panchayat seats won by them often fell vacant. “This resulted in a void in Panchayat governance,” she said. “Hence, when all-woman Panchayats came into being, there was stability and continuity, resulting in uninterrupted governance of Gram Panchayats and engagement with local democracy.”
“We have worked with the all-woman Gram Panchayats as well as male-dominated Panchayats,” she said. “What we found was that men often get elected to Panchayat posts and then migrate. In many cases, they come back to the villages specifically to stand for elections and then leave. They aren’t around to carry out the work of the Gram Panchayat or handle issues in the villages.”
Champa Miral, the Pradhan of the Naag Qwerali Gram Panchayat, emphasised that since it was the women who lived and worked in the villages, they were the ones who knew what the needs were.
“Irrigation was a huge problem,” corroborated the ward member of the same Gram Panchayat, Prabha Mehra. “We had to depend mostly on the rains. We used to dig pits in our fields to store the rainwater, and then physically carry it around for irrigation. We kept asking members of the male members of the Gram Panchayat to address the issue, but they never listened to us.”
Ganga Negi, another ward member, added that during the harvest season, since there was more work to be done, women would have to leave their homes at 1.30 am and reach the fields by 2 am. “We were compelled to walk down the hills in complete darkness though it was scary,” she said.
After the all-woman Panchayat came into being, solar lights were fixed on all the paths to make the women feel safe during their night treks to their fields. It also got irrigation pipelines put in, roads made and the derelict Panchayat Ghar and water tank repaired. “When men used to control the Gram Panchayats, they kept assigning projects that didn’t make any sense,” said Miral, “like building walls where they weren’t really required.”
Thanks to the all-woman Panchayat’s irrigation initiative, the crop yield has now increased, and the village earns well from it. The women park the money they make from this additional income in post-office accounts to be used for their children’s education. “With villagers having seen the effectiveness of an all-woman Gram Panchayat, the women will stand for elections again next year even without a reserved seat,” concluded Prabha.
Guardians of the Forest
The lives of the women of Kumaon’s mountains are inexorably woven with its forests. When they are not farming, they venture into these forests to collect deadwood and fallen branches for fuel or take their livestock to graze on the tall grass at the edges. The villages under the Pachisi Gram Panchayat are tucked away in these mountains encompassed by dense forests of pinewood.
“We go into the forests at 9 am and stay till 2 pm,” said Manju Negi, deputy Pradhan of Pachisi. “It’s a nice meeting place for us and the women from the 12 surrounding villages. After we have all finished collecting wood and grass and our animals are grazing, we exchange news from our villages. We also discuss Gram Panchayat and Gram Sabha issues such as meetings and current projects.”
Every year the Pachissi Gram Panchayat plants 100 trees in and around the village and in the forests—oaks, rhododendrons, deodars, utis (Himalayan alders), bay, guava, lemon, jamun and night jasmine.
“We believe that the trees hold our mountains together,” said a ward member of Pachisi, Deepa Devi. We keep hearing reports of landslides and floods in the Garhwal region of the state. “We don’t really have such calamities here in Kumaon. Certainly not in our villages.”
As a precautionary measure, however, Pradhan Hema Negi and government officials have held training sessions in disaster management for the villagers.
While Pachisi, like all Gram Panchayats in Kumaon, has a Van Panchayat, the all-woman Panchayats have taken it upon themselves to be the guardians of their forests, and the two elected bodies work closely together. Van Panchayats were formed following the Van Panchayat Act, specific to Uttarakhand, from the British era to look after the forest.
“A while ago, we found that a group of men had illegally cut trees from our forests under cover of darkness, and was taking them away in a vehicle,” said Manju. “We all ran down to the road, stopped them and made them unload the wood. We later distributed this wood among the villagers.”
In Pachisi, as well as in Naag Qwerali, the all-woman Gram Panchayats have banned the collection of kacchi lakdi or wood from trees. “We would regularly go into the forests and stop women from felling trees,” said Naag Qwerali ward member Neema Bora. “We explained to them that their act was decimating the forests and would affect the air quality and water supply in future and consequently our children’s health. We told them to collect fallen branches or deadwood instead.”
Looking Beyond Women's Reservation
The Bund Gram Panchayat in Bageshwar district’s Garur block has a woman Pradhan and also an all-woman Gram Panchayat. But what sets this Gram Panchayat apart from many others is that it was not elected from a seat reserved for women but one reserved for candidates from the Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
With few OBC families in Bund, and with other aspirants simply not meeting the criteria for the elections, including educational qualifications, Sapna Thapa won uncontested. With her term now coming to an end, and having gained confidence over the past five years, she will contest the next elections as well.
Within months of becoming the Pradhan, Sapna was thrown in at the deep end, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold of the country. She made arrangements for the migrants who returned, kept a register noting their movements and distributed masks and sanitisers to the villagers.
“I had no experience at that time,” she said. “I did whatever I could. The residents used to keep calling me, and this was the time when I became acquainted with everyone. I created a WhatsApp group—Mera Gaon Mera Pariva (My village, my family) —through which at least 80 people across villages are in constant touch. They have asked me not to delete the group even though my term is ending.”
Sapna pointed out that while both men and women ran Gram Panchayats and built roads in villages, it was the women who focused more on social issues. For instance, the women of this Gram Panchayat and other female residents came together to run a campaign against the rampant drinking and gambling in the villages.
“There were a lot of conflicts in our village,” said ward a ward member Asha Arya. “The men would drink and fight. We even had the police come and talk to the men once. Now drinking and gambling is not permitted in the village.”
Unlike Sapna, however, who manages to juggle household duties with Panchayat work, Asha and other members of the Panchayats feel differently about contesting the elections again. Renu Arya (33), Hemlata Arya (35) and Asha are all mothers of young children and have migrant husbands. Asha was married for barely a year when she became a ward member.
“At the time I attended my first meeting, my daughter was only a month old,” she said. “When I went for meetings, which sometimes stretched for hours, my mother-in-law would feed her cow milk or take her to our next-door neighbour, who had also just given birth, to be breastfed. That was a difficult time.”
Hemlata too said it was very difficult to participate in Panchayat activities and meetings when children were young. “When they become older, we will reconsider contesting again,” she said. “It is important to attend meetings and participate in activities—if we can’t even do that, what’s the point?”
Bhatt of The Hunger Project pointed out that their work was to help women overcome their hesitation in participating in the Panchayat system. “There has been a massive change in women’s participation in local governance over the years,” she said. “Women’s panchayats are being formed, and women are being elected even from unreserved seats. We are confident that women’s participation will only increase. But, yes, it will take time.”
In a social milieu where men are simply absent, all-woman Gram Panchayats have turned out to be a game-changing opportunity for the rural women of Uttarakhand to become active in public life and in the process, changing the development priorities for their villages.
[Esha Roy is an independent journalist writing on issues of climate change, social development and government policy.]
This article was first published by the Migration Story, India’s first newsroom to focus on the country’s vast internal migrant population.
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