Readership Survey
U of G anthropologist finds that job initiative designed to help poor women in India fails to hit the mark
BY REBECCA KENDALL
Third World communities that have historically been unaffected by consumerism are now starting to buy products from large multinational corporations. That's the finding of Prof. Marta Rohatynskyj, Sociology and Anthropology, who, after almost three decades of studying indigenous populations in Papua New Guinea and Burkina Faso, has just completed fieldwork in the rural Indian province of Madhya Pradesh.
“We're beginning to see a cultural shift in this region of India that's similar to the consumer revolution that took place in Canada and other parts of the world more than 100 years ago,” she says.
“In western society, consumption is a valued activity, and much of our time is devoted to making purchasing choices. The people of Madhya Pradesh aren't there yet, but we're seeing consumption being culturally validated.”
Buying and selling brand-name goods was not part of their lives 20 years ago, says Rohatynskyj, and although the middle and urban classes started their shift several years ago, the focus of marketing tactics is now aimed at the poorest members of society, who earn the equivalent of 75 cents to $1 a day.
“I'm interested in what they're buying and how those decisions are influenced when they have very little money to spend,” she says, noting that items such as Lifebuoy soap, Vim detergent, Pond's beauty creams, Close Up toothpaste and Lipton tea have now become hot commodities in impoverished communities throughout Madhya Pradesh. These products and myriad others are distributed by Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch company Unilever.
Early on in her study, Rohatynskyj learned of Project Shakti, an initiative developed by HLL that uses “Changing Lives in Rural India” as its tag line. HLL has been operating in India since 1931 and advertises this project as a way of giving back to the country by creating jobs for impoverished women and boosting their income potential.
Operating in more than a dozen regions throughout India, Shakti employs some 20,000 women who sell the company's products. The program was introduced to Madhya Pradesh in 2003, and close to 1,500 women have since become dealers, recruited largely through local women's organizations and the self-help groups they operate.
With an interactive website that provides links to audiovisual clips and glowing dealer testimonials, the program promotes itself with language similar to that used by international development and poverty-alleviation organizations, says Rohatynskyj. Shakti says its purpose is to empower Indian women and help them overcome poverty, but she decided to dig a little deeper to find out what the program was really set up to do.
“I wanted to see what the priorities of the project were.”
Based on a set of detailed interviews with women working as dealers, she concluded that, although the project has been successful in redistributing money in Madhya Pradesh, it doesn't hit the mark when it comes to helping women who are poor.
Among those interviewed, one-third of their dealerships were considered to be complete failures, and many others were categorized as unsuccessful. The only women whose dealerships were deemed successful were those whose families had the means to pay their start-up fees and help them contact people to see their products.
Much of the sales work is done door-to-door. For single women without male family members to help them, this has proven to be next to impossible because of tradition and culture.
“For many women, especially those from a higher caste, this is simply unthinkable,” says Rohatynskyj. “You just don't wander around to people's houses; it's just not done.” A male relative must accompany the woman or agree to do the sales himself. “Without this, their dealerships fail. The idea that this is empowering women doesn't hold up in practice.”
In addition, women who want to become dealers must invest more than $250 up front to buy products to sell. Although some can borrow the start-up money from their families, this is not an option for the poorest rural women, whom this program claims to be serving, she says. “This is an extraordinary amount of money for them.”
Although many self-help organizations can lend money for such business ventures, women must first demonstrate that they have financial stability and resources to be considered, she says.
Even when women do have the funds needed to become a dealer, many find that once their dealership has been launched, the male members of their family start running it and profit from it themselves.
“I think this project works best at the poverty-alleviation level, but it doesn't empower women in particular,” says Rohatynskyj, who notes that she was unable to interview some dealers because their male relatives wouldn't allow it. “Even in the most successful cases, it seems to perpetuate gender inequality.”
At the sales end, HLL's success in capturing its target market has been “phenomenal,” she says. The products are made more affordable to those with little money through the sale of single-serving packages that cost only a few rupees.
People have become captivated with media images of the products and are keen to buy brand-name goods, she says.
“They're no longer seen as people without; they're people with very little, and what little they have is going to enter the economy through these sorts of purchases. There's a real fear of getting adulterated or fake goods, so they want to buy the brand name.”
Studying the particular processes of entry into the consumer society at different locales around the globe has become a major focus in socio-cultural anthropology, especially under conditions of globalization and trade liberalization, she says.
“For over a century, our discipline has provided examples of societies that haven't been dependent on consumerism, and now we're less and less able to do this. Being able to have a reference point of people who are not so immersed in consumption is ethically important to us, and these opportunities are disappearing. In a sense, accounts of lifestyles that are free of the level of consumption we enjoy give us hope that we can live by other values and with greater respect for the environment.”
