Explain the contribution of women’s organisations in the development of Indian rural society.

Credit, livelihoods, and the household economy

• The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), founded in 1972 by Ela Bhatt in Ahmedabad, organised rural and urban informal women for savings, insurance, and trades, and became a model beyond Gujarat.
• Self-help groups, refinanced through NABARD’s SHG–Bank Linkage Programme (from 1992) and later DAY-NRLM (Aajeevika), put small credit and goat, dairy, and non-farm activity in women’s names.
• Kerala’s Kudumbashree Mission and Andhra–Telangana SHG federations show how neighbourhood groups can run micro-enterprises and public canteens.
• Older schemes such as DWCRA (Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas) under IRDP treated women’s groups as a delivery unit of anti-poverty policy.

Health, education, and social reform

• Mahila Samakhya (1988) built education and legal literacy sanghas in several states and trained rural women to question panchayat and school functioning.
• Women’s groups have staffed and monitored anganwadis under ICDS and supported ASHA workers under the National Health Mission, which improved immunisation and institutional delivery in many blocks.
• Anti-arrack campaigns in Andhra Pradesh in the early 1990s, and later anti-liquor and domestic-violence work by rural mahila mandals, linked household welfare to public protest.
• SEWA, Annapurna Mahila Mandal, and similar bodies also ran childcare and skill classes so that paid work did not simply add a second shift without support.

Voice, land, and local government

• The 73rd Constitutional Amendment, 1992, reserved seats for women in panchayats; organisations such as the National Federation of Indian Women, All India Democratic Women’s Association, and training NGOs prepared first-generation women sarpanches.
• Groups linked to MKSS in Rajasthan used jan sunwais to demand wages and ration transparency, which rural women often led because they collect grain and NREGA wages.
• Joint forest management and Chipko-type forest protection, associated with Gaura Devi in Chamoli, showed village women defending commons that official forestry had ignored.
• Contribution remains uneven: many SHGs are still credit circles without land rights, and honoured women representatives may be proxy for male kin.