Hansa is in her late thirties. She was once married. But now she calls herself a ‘parityakta’, a dispossessed. Her husband dumped her when she was very young. When asked why he left her, Hansa says as a matter of fact, “I don’t have the looks. Men are attracted to beautiful women.”

Her husband abandoned her and so did her family. She felt devastated and went into a state of depression until she met Ginny Srivastava, a “gori mem”, who ran an organisation called “Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan” or . ASWA works for the rights of single women. ASWA helped Hansa divorce her husband. She also dropped the surname she was given after her marriage. Her life changed for the better. It was then that she decided to join ASWA and now she fights for the single women of her native state Gujarat.

Sushila, an ASWA member from Rajasthan, says, “After I was widowed in 1994, the responsibility of my old mother-in-law and two young brother-in-laws and two sister-in-laws fell upon me. We lived in a kachcha house and could barely eat once a day. One day, a friend of mine took me to the meeting of ASWA. I went there and felt a sense of belonging. I joined the organisation and started working for other destitute women like myself. In 2000, the organisation was named Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan. More than a thousand women joined in the same year. We knew that there are millions of women in this country who needed our help in taking up their cause.”

Chandrakala, an ASWA member from Maharashtra, recalls how the organisation that initially worked only for widowed women, started holding annual meetings and soon other states too joined the movement. As the organisation tried to reach more women, it came across problems faced by other single women, such as the destitute, dispossessed, unmarried, and single mothers. Therefore, in 2000, they included these women too in the category of Single Women.

These facts came out at the second annual general body meeting of the National Forum for Single Women's Rights (NFSWR) held in New Delhi on October 11. NFSWR has been working over the last year on issues that affect Single Women in our society such as food security, land and property rights, cruel caste and community customs, employment, accessing government entitlements and so on.

NFSWR also used its general body meeting to release a report titled “Are We Forgotten Women?”, that is the result of a study conducted on the conditions and status of Single Women in six states of India.

In 2004, Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan held a large convention of single women in Rajasthan where there were participations from 11 states. At the convention, the single women from these states heard about the work done in Rajasthan by ASWA and witnessed positive changes in the lives of ASWA women.

Soon ASWA helped single women from other states form state-wide organisations. These states are Rajasthan, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. In 2008, these states started showing concrete interest in forming a national platform for single women and this is how National Forum for Single Women’s Rights (NFSWR) came into existence in 2009.

NFSWR has now turned into a national forum for single women. The organisation that was started in early nineties by Ginny Srivastava for the widows of Udaipur, Rajasthan has come very far.

Ginny Srivastava, the founder member of the forum is Canadian by birth. She came to India after marrying army officer Om Srivastava and settled in his native town Udaipur. After Ginny’s mother-in-law became a widow, she saw the shackles associated with widowhood. Her mother-in-law’s new status and her new relationship with others in the family and society brought tears to her eyes. When she asked her husband Om about it he gave her an interesting figure. Om told Ginny that the number of widows in India was more than the entire population of Canada. “I sensed that it was not only my mother-in-law, but millions of other women who were suffering,” said Ginny. She started reading about the condition of women in India. She read a book titled “Perpetual Mourning - Widowhood in Rural India” by Martha Alter Chen. The book informed her that 8 per cent of Indian women were widows, 91 per cent of which never re-married and 54 per cent of them were mentally tortured by their own family members. This disturbing figure became the thrust for Ginny forming an organisation for their help.

Ginny recounts her story. “When I started Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan in 2000, it was a small organisation, but soon thousands of widows joined us. Later, we realised that there are other low-income single women too who needed help from the society. These were women who were abandoned by their families or husbands, women who were single mothers or old unmarried women who were suffering due to their single status. In Indian society, such women go through a lot of hardship. They are verbally and physically abused and left at the mercy of God.”

According to 2001 census, there were 34,389,729 widows in India, and 2,342,930 divorced/separated women which make a total of 36 million single women (7.4 per cent of the total female population). However, this figure does not include women who have never married, and those who have not undergone legal separation. This means that the actual number of single women in the country is much higher than 36 million.

This statistics prompted Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan to conduct a study on widowed, separated, divorced and old unmarried women across six Indian states - Bihar, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. The study titled “Are we Forgotten Women?” presents some startling facts.

Out of a total of 386 respondents on whom the survey was conducted, 70 were from the age group of 18-30 years, 169 were from the age group of 31-45 years and 85 were from the age group of 46-60 years. The rest were above the age of 60 years. 131 respondents were illiterate and 46.3 per cent could not study beyond primary school. Only 26 respondents were matriculate. At the time of survey, 38.6 per cent of these women were living in their natal home while 24.6 per cent were living in their marital home. The rest were dependent on others or were living in foster homes. 19.9 per cent of respondents had minimum three dependents either in the form of in-laws or children.

38.1 per cent of the respondents had no ration cards in their name. 58 per cent were daily wagers and 31.9 per cent earned below Rs 1000 per month. 21 per cent of these women are from BPL (Below Poverty Line) category. 50.5 per cent women had no land. 54.7 per cent received no pension; Maharshtra topped this list with 66 per cent women not receiving pension.

Ginny Srivastava wants these women to be recognised as poor. The government must acknowledge their problems and ensure their social security.
So far, her campaign has been able to sensitise a couple of state governments towards the cause of single women. In Himachal Pradesh, the lobbying worked and the state government increased the grant to the children of widows from Rs 1000 to Rs 2000 under the Mother Teresa scheme; the age of children covered under the scheme has also been increased from 14 years to 18 years. In Rajasthan, the social security pension for widows has been increased from Rs 125 to Rs 400. In the proposed State Women’s Policy of the Jharkhand government, Single Women will be treated as a separate category and welfare schemes will be made accordingly. The struggle against the Gujarat govt’s order to discontinue the Widow Pension Scheme may also taste success soon.

Ginny, now herself a widow, wants to establish the identity of Single Women at both national and international levels. She says, “We want to bring about changes in the societal and political perspectives towards single women. We are trying to build the capacity of single women by making them take leadership roles at various levels. Last year, in the Panchayati Raj elections in some states, some of the Single Women stood for elections, and won! Some Women have upgraded their educational qualifications through Open Schools and IGNOU.”

To lobby for the cause that she strongly believes in, Ginny Srivastava also met home minister P Chidambaram and the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. Her organisation demanded that in BPL survey 2011, single women from low-income group be recorded as a separate category. It demands that the Govt of India recognise single women as poor, give them social security, train them for better livelihood, give them right to marital property, make stringent laws to ensure their safety, and make adequate budgetary provision to meet these objectives.

While Ginny Srivastava dwells upon the efforts that National Forum for Single Women’s Rights is making at the national level, Radhika Murmu, a single unmarried mother from Jharkhand smiles looking at her five-year old daughter.