CORE Net Conversations — Paromita Sen from SEWA Bharat
In the interest of facilitating deeper connections with CORE Net members, we developed “CORE Net Conversations”. This series features conversations between members of the CORE Net secretariat and an individual or group of individuals from one of the member organizations. As the name suggests, these are intended to be conversational, in an effort to not only explore the work that is being done, but also to get to know the individuals doing the work.
In this post, we share some takeaways from our conversation with Paromita Sen of SEWA Bharat, a national federation of organisations of women working in India’s informal economy. Their project looks at the gendered impact of the COVID lockdown on women informal economy workers across multiple locations across 13 states across India. The focus of their telephonic surveys is to seek answers to the questions, “How has the lockdown affected women informal economy workers across health, livelihood, nutrition, finances and safety?”
What motivated your organization and you to take on this research effort?
As with all SEWA projects, our work in response to COVID19 was completely driven by our members. Collective enterprises like the ones we work with were hit later in the pandemic, but it was through the union workers that we learnt of the need for our work. We began to feel the impacts of the coronavirus by January, when China was already locked down, and by the time the Indian government instituted the initial lockdown of the country we were already beginning to worry about the livelihoods of our members. In fact, our first survey to understand the potential impact of COVID-19 was launched even before India was locked down. We wanted to ensure that we had a good understanding of what our members’ concerns were. This led to us getting involved in relief work to support those most affected very early. This proved to be well-timed as home-based work for instance slowed down in February and by March our members were already very concerned.
What were some of the challenges you faced and how did your team respond to these?
Our primary mode of working is in-person, so the most immediate challenge was the inability to do this. And despite these meetings being the core of our work, getting women to attend was always a task; having to shift away from these in-person engagements only made that work more challenging. We resisted the lockdown for a long time as we felt like all our work was in the field, within the communities we work with and for, so what do we do in the absence of that level of engagement? How do we collect the data needed to support them? We weren’t entirely sure of the feasibility of technology, and we really had to adapt to digital means of engagement, which thankfully has been very successful. We had presumptions about how much the informal sector could not deal with the digital interactions, but these have not borne out: the community members have adapted very quickly and effectively to this. Also, community leaders have really stepped up to adopt things like UPI and GPay, things that people in the city also struggle with, in order to find ways to move the community forward, support members, and protect their communities. And these interventions are not always digital ones. For example, there is a community in Jharkhand that SEWA works with who constructed a bamboo barrier around their entire village in order to prevent outsiders from entering, in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus within their borders. The level of community action that we have seen has really been wonderful! The communities that SEWA works with decide what they want and need from SEWA; it’s very organic and grassroots in that way. And we realised through the actions we observed that many of us were really redundant; the communities really didn’t need us at a certain point and are more than capable of taking care of themselves independent of outside support. The small things really add up!
What are some key learnings from your research project so far?
Learnings thus far can really be bifurcated between internal and external focuses.
Internally, for us at SEWA, the initial key insight was around how best to support our teams with data collection. Again, in the absence of in-person engagements, we needed to adapt and design our data collection activities around what was the most critical information needed, and then how best to go about gathering that data. This informed both the digital platforms (i.e., using smartphones) as well as the design of the questionnaires themselves. Once we arrived at these learnings, we were better able to support our members with incorporating this into their activities.
Externally, we discovered just how critical it is to aggregate member data across states, and then use this to develop recommendations by trade. There is a significant difference between not only the work that they do, but also the manner in which the pandemic and related responses to it impact the workers. For example, the experience of a domestic worker who can no longer enter people’s homes in order to provide their services is going to be different from that of a street vendor who may still be able to ply their trade to some extent. The realities of workers as dictated by their trade need to be considered when evaluating how best to support them.
“The realities of workers as dictated by their trade need to be considered when evaluating how best to support them.”
What has been the greatest value for you/what would you like as a value addition, as a CORE Net member?
The conversations have been great, and very informative. They’re not about showing off or self-promotion, but rather the interactions, providing people a platform to share learnings and bounce ideas off each other. It’s this collaborative spirit that motivated me to get the SEWA Bharat team involved. CORE Net has really helped us to do some soul searching while helping us to pause and think about these issues; it’s the one space where all the relevant things come together. Also, there is such great diversity represented in the network in terms of areas of enquiry, research locations, member organisations, and more; it’s a really great, open space for learning and sharing. Lastly, the literature! There are so many publications that we now have access to that can help keep us informed about all the work around COVID-19 in India that is happening, as well as all the learnings from each.
SEWA’s work researching COVID-19 spans many diverse contexts within India. What are some similarities and differences with respect to COVID’s impact across these settings?
One fundamental truth that spans all contexts is the importance of housing relative to your livelihood. Access to seemingly basic things like sanitation, water, drainage is so critical, and we want to draw attention to this. Housing is really related to your ability to survive, especially in the midst of a pandemic like this. Unfortunately, what we have seen is that housing is a massive crisis; far too many people lack access to the basics and that makes enduring this pandemic that much more challenging.
Another similarity is in respect to transportation. Women’s mobility completely broke down and disappeared during the lockdown. This meant that many women selling produce to support themselves and their families had to resort to selling their goods at local markets and, consequently, at lower costs because they could not access transport to avail other markets. This has had a huge, negative impact on earning potential. Additionally, the restrictions in movement has limited, or even eliminated, women’s ability to attend gatherings like SEWA meetings. This takes away the spaces that women would normally capitalize on in order to access and understand their rights, as well as to articulate their demands.
“Access to seemingly basic things like sanitation, water, drainage is so critical, and we want to draw attention to this. Housing is really related to your ability to survive, especially in the midst of a pandemic like this.”
Your participants and data collectors are all women workers in the informal economy. How did you prepare both for the new realities of conducting research during a pandemic?
SEWA’s work, again, is reactive to the needs and interests of the communities that we work for and with, so the questions that needed to be explored and answered came from them. Thanks to this, our challenge was more around process than it was the areas of enquiry to be investigated. That said, we worked on the questionnaires with all of the members to better understand what needed to be asked as well as how best to ask (e.g., wording, framing, focus, etc.) These women have been doing this for a long, long time (e.g 30+ years), so this level of experiential learning goes a long way. We helped them to set up things like informal focus group discussions and follow up interviews, as well as to identify the best times to call on community members to conduct research. This was not without its challenges though. Sometimes we end up prioritising short term needs over long term, as there are always short term needs! With that in mind, we always try to focus on how all of the work being done can contribute to larger scopes of knowledge; how the learnings can help address short-term needs whilst also contributing to a body of work that supports long-term results.
Some of your research was done early on in the pandemic. What have you learned since then? How has the response to the pandemic changed, if at all?
The distance necessary to ensure communities are safe and protected allows us to take on more of a role as observers: we’re on the phone, so we can be “a fly on the wall”. We miss the interpersonal dynamic, and the participatory empathy one normally develops when engaging with the community in person is a lot less, but it’s allowed us the opportunity to take an even further step while the communities are even more empowered to take the lead. It has also led us to think about and evaluate the potential shift to ethnographic, immersive studies; to spend more time on projects (e.g., 6 weeks versus 2 weeks) to deepen our understanding of challenges.
Contextualise India — What is one thing you would like everyone to know about the coronavirus pandemic’s impact in the communities you’re working in?
Very specifically, I’d like people to really understand the time it takes for a woman to run a home here in India. There are very real challenges with respect to things like access to water that occupy a lot of a woman’s time and prevent her from doing other activities that she may year for. We try to educate people on these realities through storytelling: to understand the story of a community, one must tell the story of an individual member. Hearing these stories through the voice of the woman experiencing this helps develop that participatory empathy we discussed before.
