ELA RAMESH BHATT (1933--)

Ela Ramesh Bhatt was born on September 7, 1933 in Ahmedabad, India. The second of three daughters, Ela grew up in a well-to-do family deeply interested and active in social causes. Her childhood was spent in Surat, an export centre on the coast about 100 miles from Ahmedabad, where her father, Sumant Bhatt, had a successful law practice. Her mother, Vanalila Vyas, was  active in the women's movement.

 

Bhatt attended Sarwajanik Girls High School, Surat from 1940 to 1948, and then M.T.B. College, Surat, affiliated with Gujarat University, where she received a Bachelor  of Arts degree in English in 1952.

 

Following graduation, Ela Bhatt enrolled in Sir L.A. Shah Law College, affiliated with Gujarat University, in Ahmedabad. Her father hoped that she would follow in the family footsteps by going into the legal profession and she dutifully complied, even though she was uncertain about her own abilities in the field. In 1954 she received a law degree and a Gold Medal for her outstanding work in Hindu law.

 

Bhatt taught English briefly at Shrimati Nathibai Damodardas Thackersey Women's University in Bombay, but teaching was not a profession which she found satisfying. In 1955 she joined the legal department of the Textile Labour Association (TLA) in Ahmedabad at the invitation of two of the organization's founders, Anasuyaben Surabhai and Shankarlal Banker. As a junior lawyer she initially prepared material for the senior counsel. Later, having done considerable work for workers' gratuity, which subsequently became a law, she began to appear in the Labour Court on her own, first on small and then on important cases.

 

In 1956 Ela and Ramesh Bhatt were married. After receiving a master's degree in economics Ramesh had joined the faculty of Gujarat Vidyapeeth National University in Ahmedabad where he not only taught but was coordinator of the Center for Management and Professional Training, and Director of the Consumer Education and Research Center at the university. He has been active as President of the Gujarat University Area Teacher's Association and Founder of the Gujarat Economic Association, a research organization.

 

Ela continued to work in the union's legal department - doing what she described as a "compromise between legal work and social work" -- until the birth of their children, Amimayi (1958) and Mihir (1959).

 

In 1961 she returned to the work force, taking a position in the Labour Ministry of Gujarat as an Employment Officer. In this position her first work was submitting suitable candidates to employers. Later she was given independent charge of University Employment and Information Bureau of Gujarat University in Ahmedabad where she was responsible for providing vocational guidance and training to candidates in addition to job placement. Thereafter she was sent to Pusa Institute of Employment and Training in New Delhi and upon her return was appointed Incharge of Occupation Information. In this technical job from 1966 to 1968 she explored new employment opportunities, reviewed existing definitions of various occupations in the National Code of Occupation and framed definitions for new occupations. When, in 1968, she was asked by the TLA to become head of its Women's Wing she rejoined the union, and took intense interest in the women for whom she had worked in the ministry.

 

Bhatt was aware that thousands of wives and daughters of textile workers, as well as other women, toiled as self-employed junk-smiths, garment makers, vegetable vendors and hawkers to supplement the family income. While there were state laws which protected the interests of industrial workers, there were none which protected these self-employed women. Much to her consternation, Bhatt discovered that self-employed women were not even included in the 1971 Census as workers!

 

Shuttling between urban areas and the nearby villages, the self-employed women were unorganized, unprotected, economically weak and had no bargaining power. Recognizing this state of affairs, Bhatt determined to work for this segment of the population which had a great impact on the economy, yet which was virtually forgotten in terms of legal rights or protection of interests. The self-employed women themselves implored Bhatt to work on their behalf, and the first group to come under the wing of the women's section was the handcart pullers - women who push, rather than pull handcarts with loads of 500 to 700 kilograms. A survey was made of their socio-economic conditions, to be followed by surveys of women in the job fields of vegetable vendor, garment maker, used garment vendor, junk-smith and milkmaid. ‘Profiles of Self-Employed Women’ (1975) written by Bhatt summarizes many of the findings from these studies.

 

The findings reported by Bhatt and her co-workers are grim. Looking at the conditions in the which  self-employed women lived they found that 97 percent of those studied lived in slums, 93 percent were illiterates, and their average number of children was four. Their monthly incomes ranged from Rupees 50 (about US$ 7.50 in 1975) for the garment makers to Rupees 355 (US$ 54 in 1975) for the vegetable vendors. Large percentages in each group were in debt: 25 percent of the junk-smiths, 35 percent of the milk producers, 44 percent of the garment makers, 46 percent of the handcart pullers, 61%   of the used garment vendors and 79 percent of vegetable sellers. The reason for the high debt ratio of vegetable vendors was that 49 percent rented their means of conveyance as did 46 percent of the handcart pullers. Taking their children to the worksite was the practice of a large number of women. Among other common problems for these women were shortage of capital, shortage of raw materials, inadequacy of work place and extremely high interest rates on money borrowed for daily rental of means of production or stock purchase.

 

Bhatt, with the full cooperation of Arvind Buch, president of TLA, undertook to organize these self-employed women into a union under the auspices of the Women’s Wing of the TLA. In 1972, with Buch as President and Bhatt as General Secretary, the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) was established. One of the first difficulties they encountered was in registering SEWA with the government. The government objected to the registration of SEWA as a union because, it was argued, under the law a union was only for those who worked for someone else. Since the members of SEWA were self-employed, the organization did not fall into that legal category. Bhatt, however, convinced the government that a union could exist for the economic development of its members as well as for protection against exploitation by employers. The government reluctantly agreed and the union was registered in 1972 under the Trade Union Act of 1926.

 

SEWA today has a part-time committed staff of 20, with 14 engaged in field work, 2 in administration, 2 in loan recovery and 2 in research. The membership fee of Rs.3 was raised to Rs.5 in 1975. SEWA is governed by a 22 member executive committee and a representative board made up of 153 elected leaders from the seven different sections of the membership; garment makers, used garment dealers, handcart pullers, vegetable vendors, junk-smiths, milk producers and miscellaneous workers. Leaders of each group meet every month and, because they know the conditions under which their fellow workers toil, they provide the necessary link between the membership and the executive committee.

 

The union has had unprecedented success from the very beginning in attracting membership. By the end of 1975, only three years after its inception, there were 5,258 members, and one year later the membership had reached 9,000 in Ahmedabad, with some 2,000 members in a newly opened center in the handloom community of Bhavnagar. Today there are 10,667 members in the city. In addition to bringing together women from a variety of occupations, SEWA has been successful in enrolling women from different tribes -- Waghris, Rabaris and Marwaris for example - who were previously divided by religious and cultural differences.

 

One of the findings which came out most clearly from the early studies was the dependency of self-employed women on money lenders who demanded extremely high interest rates. Therefore the first concern of SEWA was the protection of its members from exploitation. To alleviate this dependency, SEWA embarked on a project to provide financial loans to its members. Several banks were approached and to everyone's surprise the banks agreed to process loans. However, unforeseen problems arose as it became evident that union members were inexperienced in the world of finance and that the banks were unprepared to deal with SEWA customers, the like of which they had never before seen.

 

And so the idea was born; the members of SEWA decided to form a women's cooperative bank. The bank required a minimum investment of Rupees 10 (US$ 1.40) per member and this was quickly acquired. More difficult to attain were the legally required signatures of 15 charter SEWA members. Staff members sat down with the illiterate women -- whose fingers were pricked by needles, soiled by vegetables and scarred by scrap metal -- to teach them how to write their names. Finally 15 could put their shaky signatures on a piece of paper and in July 1974, after a struggle with the government to convince officials of the banks viability, an official of the Gujarat government inaugurated the Shri Mahila SEWA Sahakari Bank Limited (the Mahila SEWA Cooperative Bank, Ltd.).

 

SEWA has established a literacy program to teach members to read but has had little positive response; the women's energies are directed towards earning a living. A welfare section focuses upon solving some of the major social problems. It provides a child care center for vegetable vendors and plans for similar centers for other groups. It has been negotiating with the State Housing Board for low cost housing for 1,000 SEWA members. After studying the medical conditions of its participants, SEWA set up the Mahila SEWA Trust which provides health, maternity, widowhood and health benefits for members at a modest price. Eye checkups are made and glasses have been provided to a number of members.

 

One of the many obstacles faced by self-employed women is harassment by the police and the union now processes any complaints members have. In 1975 there were 796 complaints registered; 745 were solved by the field workers assigned to this job; in three cases legal aid was provided by SEWA. There is now an attorney connected with SEWA who handles all complaints that need legal assistance.

 

Ela Bhatt leads an active and busy life. In addition to her work with TLA and the SEWA union, she is Managing Director of the SEWA Bank and Vice President of the Gujarat Agriculture Workers' Union, the Self-Employed Workers' Organization and the Construction Workers' Union, and has found time to serve on the advisory boards of the Gujarat State Adult Education Committee and the International SOS Villages. The latter organization, based in Vienna, has a worldwide network of villages where orphaned children and destitute women live together in family units and help is given to rehabilitate and strengthen these new families. Such an SOS Children's Village exists in Ahmedabad at Shreyes.

 

Because of her experience in developing SEWA, Bhatt has often been asked to participate in the international meetings and conferences. In 1972 she attended the Women's Leadership Seminar in Japan and in 1975 she participated as panelist on the topic of "Women at Work" in Mexico in a UN-sponsored International Women's Year Conference. She traveled to the United States in 1973 under a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) grant, and to England in 1977 as a Study Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Sussex where she presented a paper, "An Approach to the Rural Poor". In 1977 she also became a Consultant to UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) for the Bangladesh Women's Department.

 

As the guiding spirit behind SEWA and its many projects, Ela Ramesh Bhatt has shown that the weak and the poor can, through their collective strength, overcome numerous handicaps. Her great confidence in the ability of self-employed women is seen in the structure of SEWA; it is a grass-roots organization which genuinely utilizes the talents and knowledge of its members.