Since 2000, Ekta Mahila Manch is a wing of Navrachna Samaj Sevi Sansthan, which aims to enable women to develop their understanding on social, economical, educational and political(advocacy) spheres.
EMM is encouraging and empowering women by organizing capacity building training programs and promoting organic farming, kitchen garden and generating sustainable livelihood for them.
Moreover, to reinforce women’s implication in the movement. Concretely, Ekta Mahila Manch’s action consists in ensuring that women can struggle themselves for their rights, through training on rights and non-violence, development of their leadership, participation on village councils, etc. The objective is also to enable women to gain autonomy, notably by organizing self-help groups which encourage their economic independency. These actions lead to a real development process for women : they socialize in self-help groups, while developing their livelihood resources, and thus they start to perceive themselves in a social role, not only in a domestic one, to analyze problems in the society and to express their opinion. Finally, they acquire capacities in leadership that enable them to fully play a role at social, economic and political levels. In 2010-2011, Ekta Mahila Manch organized many leadership trainings for women, and also marches, public meetings, etc. For 2012, the objective of Ekta Mahila Manch was to ensure the participation of 50% of women in the March Jan Satyragraha, which means the participation of 50 000 women.
Currently, with the support of the New World Foundation and support from Manav Jeevan Vikas Samiti Katni, through Ekta Mahila Manch, this program of developing women’s local leadership is being done by an intensive one-year training of young women. The rationale is to strengthen women, so they will counteract widespread violence in the society. Moreover, this encourages and motivates the community to make an organizational effort to eliminate gender violence.
For the last 20 years, Ekta Mahila Manch has been working on women’s rights on water, forests, and land with deprived families and on basic needs as well as with education, health and employment. By forming small women’s organizations (known as sangathans) in the villages, the work has been done to raise the demands for equal status of women, as community decision-makers and as kishans(farmers), which is the main livelihood. Also, because there is a wide prevalence of liquor bans to bring down the actual physical violence, public pressure has been exerted through rallies, protests and memorandums at village, Work is being done to eliminate violence against women.
In this current program, women’s leadership is being developed at the district level by identifying a woman trainer that can work in ten villages. Once there are enough district levels leaders, it can impact the state level in four states: Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Bihar. This project has identified 21 districts leaders and 201 village leaders as the target. The work has been started by selecting the district coordinator. Orientation and state-level meetings were conducted to educate them about work activities in their respective places so that everyone has a common understanding of work and the target by which they can bring second leadership to EKTA MAHILA MANCH.