Articles by Maithreyi Krishnaraj

Feminism Crossing Thresholds. Feminist Essays in Social History by Meera Kosambi; Permanent Black, Mumbai/NewDelhi,
MAITHREYI KRISHNARAJ Meera Kosambi is a well known scholar on Maharashtra

Even if women's studies centres concentrated more on academic work rather than the action programmes imposed on them by the University Grants Commission, would they be equipped to do so? Most women's studies practitioners skirt the tricky issues of methodology and concept and march ahead bravely, meticulously documenting "women's oppression". The tragedy is that this empiricism does not equip us in developing our own theoretical foundations. If we want women's studies to be an interdisciplinary enterprise, we will have to see if it can be integrated as a specific epistemology to rebuild the existing structure of knowledge by creating new organising concepts, methodologies, skills and reciprocal assimilation of various disciplines.

A tribute from a friend and collaborator of three decades.

Food security is contingent on three parameters - availability, accessibility and affordability. While availability and accessibility relate to production and distribution, the question of affordability is linked to Amartya Sen's concepts of 'endowment' and 'exchange entitlements', that is, the resources at one's disposal that determines one's capacity to buy food. The papers in this collection on gender and food security deal precisely with this problem of endowment and exchange entitlement, especially with regard to women. They seek to draw attention to the resources, mainly employment, available to women for procuring food. However, apart from inadequate opportunities for wage labour, lack of command over productive resources acts as a major constraint on those women who do undertake farming for the household. Participation in the production of food, moreover, does not guarantee commensurate returns. All the papers deal with rice farming, but they are illustrative of the general situation regarding food security among poor women and point to the urgency of public measures for the protection of this vulnerable section.

Gender budgeting exercises attempt to assess how far prevailing gender-based biases are incorporated into budgetary exercises. Such analyses also provide women with vital information regarding the contents and focus of existing government policies. The aim is to promote greater transparency and enhance democracy. After the late 1990s, when gender budgeting exercises were first set in motion, such exercises have quickly come into vogue and many scholars have undertaken them. This period has also been marked by shifts in economic policies, especially in developing countries. Reforms in the name of development that have had a pernicious effect on women have been implemented. Recent studies in India have looked at the many well-intentioned public schemes that have failed to achieve significant results. The set of papers included in this review illustrates the progress made so far. While there is still need for crucial interaction between analysis and the structures of gender that currently exist in society as well as with the elements necessary for transforming gender relations, these efforts, as presented here, are a step towards opening a meaningful dialogue with policy-makers to make them appreciate exactly what it is that women want and in what form.