Presenting Kudumbashree’s history through stories of women

A community-based chronicle of what is likely the largest women collective in the country. A recount of 25 years of the Kudumbashree journey through contemporary stories of women. History-writing by the Kudumbashree women for women. However one describes Rachna, the end result has the potential to be an exciting, in-depth, and incisive look at Kudumbashree’s growth and development in its silver jubilee year.

Rachna will be a participatory exercise involving nearly five lakh women who have been community development society (CDS) members from the beginning of Kudumbashree till now. These are the women who are standing on their own feet and those who have created a space for themselves in society, courtesy the belief and support provided by the Kudumbashree.

And their stories will be of the progress from socially and financially disadvantaged backgrounds to a vastly different scenario over the past two decades and a half. They will document the family and social structures that existed then and the lives of ordinary women and how these changed with the growth of the Kudumbashree into a 45-lakh-strong network.

For posterity

These accounts are important from the historical perspective too so that society and the future generations do not remain ignorant of this transformation. The experiences and memories of the Kudumbashree women are an invaluable asset that Rachna seeks to share.

Since this history-writing will be from the lens of the Kudumbashree CDS, all 1,070 CDSs in the State will engage in the exercise. Academic groups of five to 10 women such as auxiliary group members, women with academic qualifications, retired women, researchers, and so on who are interested in creative writing will be formed in each local body. Rachna committees of 50 to 100 members comprising CDS office-bearers from 1998 till 2023 will also be constituted. They can tap into old development reports of local bodies, CDS minutes’ books, registers and so on to write the histories.

Women who have overcome all odds to achieve financial independence, who made their voice heard in family and in public spaces, who understood the strength of collectives and fought anti-women attitudes and women whose world changed from the four walls of a house to that of local body chiefs, all these will be included in Rachna. It will be a testimonial to Kudumbashree initiatives, the change they brought, and their impact on women empowerment and poverty alleviation.

Future course

This look at the past 25 years of the Kudumbashree by those are part of it will also determine the path that the mission takes in the future.

President Droupadi Murmu will inaugurate Rachna at a programme as part of the silver jubilee celebrations of the Kudumbashree in the capital on Friday.