GS Paper 2/3
Syllabus: S&T/Government Programmes/Role of Women and Women’s Organization
Source: TH
Context: Women from rural India are adopting clean energy-based livelihood technologies (from solar refrigerators to silk-reeling machines) to catalyse their businesses and transform women’s livelihoods at the grassroots.
Highlights of a study (by CEEW):
- Out of the 13,000 early adopters of clean tech livelihood appliances, more than 80% are women.
- Distributed renewable energy (DRE)-powered technologies provide an additional advantage to women farmers by enhancing income opportunities through mechanisation.
- They also free women from several gender-assigned manual activities that are laborious.
- By 2030, India is expected to see 30 million women-owned MSMEs employing around 150 million people.
Challenges in scaling up these accomplishments:
- Novelty and a high starting price of these technologies
- Perceived as high-risk purchases, especially by women users
- The relatively lower risk appetite of rural women due to socioeconomic reasons
- Limited avenues to avail financing
- Lack of established market linkages
- Limited mobility/networks of women outside their villages
Way ahead – How to scale up this impact?
- Leverage the experience of early women adopters.
- Organise hyperlocal events and demos – create spaces for women to network, and become aware.
- Enable easy finance to purchase products. Financiers should consider the technologies themselves as collateral while easing the loan application process.
- Ensure adequate after-sales services and buy-backs.
- Support backwards and forward market linkage – finding and connecting producers to consumption hubs in urban areas.
- Collectivising women or establishing business models that enable them to sell to an intermediary can ensure a regular revenue stream.
- Enable policy convergence. Efforts towards promoting livelihoods for women from State rural livelihood missions, agriculture departments, etc., must be converged.
- Leveraging the reach of government institutions is imperative.
Best practice: Kissan Dharmbir, an energy-efficient food processor manufacturer, engaged an Agra-based micro-entrepreneur using the processor to produce jams, as a demo champion.
Conclusion: Similar to how it takes a village to raise a child, a village of politicians, investors, financiers, and technology promoters, is required to fully realise the potential of rural women and clean technologies.
Insta Links:
Mains Links:
Examine the role of the ‘Gig Economy’ in the process of empowerment of women in India. (UPSC 2021)
