Centring Women in Nepal's Economy and Society (The Collected Works of Meena Acharya) Set of 2 Volumes

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

Centring Women in Nepal's Economy and Society brings together Meena Acharya's intellectual output spanning half a century. These writings delve into the multifaceted intersection of women and the economy, development, and politics. From the intricacies of their role and impact on households and society at large, Acharya unveils the critical contributions made by women in all spheres of life. Filled with insightful, evidence-based research and analysis, the book teases out the nuanced connections between women and the socio-political landscape. This two-volume anthology represents and reflects the progress made by Nepali women and the author herself in understanding and advancing their own agency. It will serve as an indispensable resource for scholars, policymakers, development practitioners, and anyone passionate about women's empowerment and gender equality in Nepal.

When I started working as a research officer at Nepal Rastra Bank in 1967, fresh with a degree in economic cybernetics from Moscow University, I knew little about the Nepali economy. I started to work on Nepal's macro economy, banking, finance and overall development status. My first priority was to understand the country. But I also had to fight many battles in my personal and professional life on account of being a woman, right from trying to keep my Nepali citizenship while being married to a foreign citizen to travelling outside Kathmandu for economic surveys. I was quite aware of the unequal laws and rampant poverty in Nepal. My visits to the countryside in the course of my work further fortified my wish and resolve to work for women and other disadvantaged people.

My readings of capitalist economic theories followed by training in the Soviet Union and immersion in Marxist theories had equipped me with new tools of analysis of the economy. It had provided me with a holistic outlook to examine social and economic problems, particularly inequality. I had grown up in a political milieu where my family had been intensely involved in the main political events in Nepal. My father had been imprisoned for life, and my mother, in the face of social ostracism, was fighting the tyranny of the Rana regime with unimaginable courage and determination. My sister and I accompanied her in many of her travels and battles. Her steadfast fight against discriminatory social practices such as child marriage, prohibition against widow remarriage, girls' education and women's political participation along with strong and active support for the democratic movement of the time could not but leave us untouched. Life itself taught me how to fight for the right causes from the very beginning.

This foreword focuses on four publications out of Meena Acharya's vast body of work: 1) Statistical Profile of Nepalese Women: A Critical Review; 2) The Maithili Women of Sirsia; 3) The Rural Women of Nepal: An Aggregate Analysis and Summary of 8 Village Studies, and 4) Women and the Subsistence Sector: Economic Participation and Household Decision-making in Nepal. The first three are books and the fourth is a monograph. Two were co-authored with me and all were produced fairly early in Meena's career as part of, or a follow-on to a USAID- funded research project on the 'Status of Women in Nepal' carried out by the Centre for Economic Development and Administration at Tribhuvan University. (As a colleague and close friend of hers for some 48 years, I have taken the liberty of referring to Dr Acharya by her first name.) This research was carried out in the late 1970s and early 80s at a time when people still spoke of 'women's studies' rather than gender analysis and there was little recognition in most quarters that current economic systems at the household, national and global levels reflected highly asymmetrical power relations between men and women.

To those familiar with the Nepali academic and policy-making world, Meena Acharya's contribution represents the rare evidence-based dissenting voice that frequently challenged dominant orthodox views on gender relations and the treatment of marginalised groups. She wrote on behalf of all Nepali women, but while representing them, she also insisted that the state look after the underprivileged and equity be proportionately prioritised while pursuing economic growth. Asking for equal rights for women in today's Nepal with female literacy at 69.4 per cent is difficult, and it was even more so in the 1970s when Acharya started writing about it and the literacy rate of women in Nepal was about 4 per cent. Her nearly five decades of writings thus cover epochal moments of transformation for women in Nepal.

Despite being an integral part of the workforce, women have long been quite invisible. The surprise is that the work they did remained unseen even though their role is so important for every household. Women still comprise the main labour force for intra-household and on-farm activities. However, economic activities conducted by women had generally not been quantified. Given that only a small fraction of women was employed in visible fields, this neglect of the main tasks carried out by women relegated them to a lower status even in official statistics such as the System of National Accounts (SNA). Acharya was the pioneer economist who conducted studies to evaluate household maintenance work. She advocated for a planning approach that emphasised the access of ordinary people and participation of all in the process. In her writing on accessible planning and participatory development, she makes the argument that once these twin objectives are achieved, the economy would become more representative.

Does modernisation help women empowerment? This question has been answered multiple times in the literature. New technologies have disruptive power and they can easily be gender biased. Using data from the participation of women engaged in the construction and transportation sectors, Acharya provides evidence that as motorised transportation become more popular in Nepal between 1951 and 1971, women porters lost their job as newly created jobs in the transportation sector went exclusively to male workers. This provides a powerful example of how aggregate gains in the economy may still lead to the loss for some groups and the pursuit of a few aggregate economic indicators (such as GDP) can be misleading.

The impact of modernisation on women is a topic Acharya keeps revisiting. Early evidence suggested that with modernisation, women lost jobs in several sectors in Nepal. As mentioned earlier, a good example is the transport sector. The new jobs, of drivers, conductors and helpers, all were taken by men. They replaced the porters along the hills where women were well represented. Modernisation thus robbed some women of work opportunities and made them economically more dependent on male household members. Some of these problems are global in nature. Due to their responsibility as child-bearers, women tend to be unable to advance much further in the formal sector even in advanced countries. Early creation of wealth had led to similar problems as well. As men started to earn more money and households in general became affluent, they wanted to keep female household members more secluded and women who earned relatively modest incomes were the first to quit their jobs, go back to the kitchen, and serve the family.