Cornell-SEWA-WIEGO 2008 Dialogue – Ahmedabad and Delhi – Compendium of Personal and Technical Notes

By Namrata Bali, Kaushik Basu, Haroon Bhorat, Françoise Carré, Gary Fields, Renana Jhabvala, Ravi Kanbur, Francie Lund, Jeemol Unni, Imraan Valodia, Martha Alter Chen on August 01, 2008

The Cornell-SEWA-WIEGO Dialogue Group was started in 2003, to advance
discussions between economists, social scientists and ground level activists working on issues of labor, gender and poverty.1 In the last five years the group has met five times with the SEWA Academy in Ahmedabad in January, 2004; at Harvard University in October, 2004; at Cornell University in November, 2006; in Durban in March, 2007; and in Ahmedabad and Delhi in March, 2008.

The objective has been to build a community of conversation to help understand,
and to build a bridge between, different analytical and policy perspectives on labor and poverty. Throughout, the group has tried to ground its discussions in the realities of the lives of poor women.

In March of 2008 the group returned to Ahmedabad, to meet again the host ladies after a gap of four years, to see how their lives had changed, and to renew the contact. SEWA has now run many dozens of EDPs, but this was the first time that a group had returned for a reunion with its host ladies. Not all of our host ladies, and not all of the original group, could be present. But it was a moving experience for all who were present. From Ahmedabad the group also went to see the operation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in tribal areas of Gujarat. In Ahmedabad, and later in Delhi, where the group  interacted with senior policy makers from the Indian Planning Commission and the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, our dialogue on analysis and policy continued, enriched by these experiences. We each spoke of our “light bulb moments”, when our thinking changed as a result of the experience and the dialogue.

As in Ahmedabad, 2004, and in Durban, 2007, dialogue group members were
invited to write about their experiences, bringing out the personal and the technical. Some wrote two separate notes, some combined them into one. No uniformity was required on format. The notes as prepared are gathered together in this compendium, as a small part of the record of a remarkable reunion, and of the remarkable process of the Cornell-SEWA-WIEGO dialogue.

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