Stitching up clothes and cooking lunches for office workers, 200 women in the slums of Bombay have found a glimmer of independence through a project that offers them incomes and a break from the cycle of gender and caste discrimination.
"In India, women suffer the most. They rely first on their parents or their brothers and then their husbands," said Sister Isabel, a Spaniard who launched the Creative Handicraft project in 1984.
"When a couple only has girls as children, it's seen as a catastrophe: The husband leaves. I wanted to build something for those women."
The project, which runs eight cooperatives in the alleys of the Agashnagar slum, will showcase its work when it sells its food during the Jan. 16 to Jan. 21 World Social Forum, the annual convention of anti-globalization forces.
For the first World Social Forum outside Brazil, organizers chose Bombay whose high-rises house some of the world's top global firms but where around half of the 18 million-strong population lives in poverty.
Johny Joseph, secretary general of Creative Handicraft, said the project began as a way "to offer a salary to women so that they don't hesitate to send to school their children, who were spending the day begging."
Lydia Miami, an Asia officer of the Paris-based Catholic Committee Against Hunger and for Development which supports the project, stressed a key obstacle was the dowry system which permeates Indian society.
"In India, it's the woman and her family who have to pay dowry, but they don't always have the means. And that's why they get beaten," Miami said on a visit to the site.
Sitting on the ground with a dozen other women in brightly colored saris, Beula, 22, stitched a pillow cover to be sold through the project.
"My husband's job is unstable. For me it's good to have a permanent income," she said.
The work each month earns her around 1,300 rupees, or about US$28, a significant sum for a woman in a Bombay slum. In addition, she is granted another US$11 monthly for each of her children.
A few steps higher in the shantytown, other women prepare lunch. The project -- presumably like the customers at the World Social Forum -- does not discriminate against those who belong to Hinduism's lowest and poorest class, the Dalits
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