पान:Bitter Sugarcane.pdf/45

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Such a huge Gramsabha was totally new for them as most of the time this gramsabhas only used to appear on official paper. We declared that for every girl born, the 'Grampanchayat' will give 500 @ National Savings Certificate'. Another resolution was passed against domestic violence. One resolution that villagers refused to accept was of dowry. They told me “Sister, be practical, dowry is widespread here and there will be no marriage without dowry. There is no point in passing resolutions that we can't fulfil. We have tried passing such resolutions before but they haven't changed a thing. Only pass resolutions that are practical for us!" They had a valid point, we decided to give it a thought. After a lot of discussions, we came up with an idea. We decided to pass another resolution which said that 'anybody who does the wedding in the minimum of cost, without a dowry, without any loan, will be awarded by the Gramsabha next year.' It's always better to ignite provocation in people for social changes instead of forcefully making them do things. The situation with dowry was pretty miserable in Mangewadi. We heard that sugarcane labourers take wages of 2-3 years in advance for dowry, leaving them with no money and more labour work for coming years. It was common to sell land and farm animals like cows and buffalos for dowry. But we thought at least during the drought, the dowry amount would be less or the marriages would happen in less amount, but it was the opposite. We got to know that the families on the groom's side ask for more dowry from the other end because they themselves can't grow anything on their farm. The situation was beyond our imagination. One old lady asked us about the child-marriages in the village. She stood up in the gram sabha and asked: “It's easy to tell people not to engage their children in child-marriage but in my case and in many other cases, how is it possible for an old lady like me to take care of daughters when their parents are out for labour work?" Another valid question, another question for which we didn't have an answer for at that moment. We were in many such dilemmas but our work was still going on. In one village we arranged a meeting for all the women on 25th January, where surprisingly many men also came. They agreed to the points that came