Ladies Special

The final male bastions are crumbling fast, especially in chronically job-scarce Kerala. Suddenly there are women bus conductors, speedboat drivers, postmen (postwomen?), petrol pump attendants and what have you. They come from middle class families, from SC/ST communities. According to the latest official survey, women have been admitted in technical training institutes and have qualified as civil and mechanical draftsmen, surveyors, carpenters, sheet metal workers and radio and TV mechanics. In government polytechnics, as many as 56.9 per cent of the students are female. Empowerment of women is clearly not just a slogan here.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the remote village of Manathana, 70 km off Kannur and close to the Wayanad forests, where A.K. Valsala, 22, drives her auto. A Kurichiyan tribal—her forefathers roamed the forests, wove mats and made baskets from coconut palm leaves for a living—she does an eight-to-five shift and earns about Rs 200 a day. Next month she starts repaying her loan from the SC/ST Development Corporation for her rear engine Bajaj.

On the job for three months now, Valsala can't recall even a wolf whistle. At times, curious passengers asked her how it feels to be a woman doing a man's job. "Just a few innocent questions. Initially, people would look at me in surprise. Now they have got used to me. All my passengers like me. I don't fight over the fare," she says.

Why auto-driving? Valsala reckons she wasn't cut out for 'female' jobs like chopping vegetables. After completing her pre-degree (plus two equivalent), she grabbed the chance when she saw an advertisement in a local paper inviting Scheduled Tribe members who wanted to take up auto-driving. Today, eight more Kurichiyan women hold driving licences and await government loans to buy vehicles. And many more are on the way: the Kerala government has announced auto-driving training schemes for women in every district.

In neighbouring Kelakom, 36-year-old Devutty, another Kurichiyan woman, got her auto licence last year. But unlike Valsala, she hasn't had a smooth ride. The vehicle has been more off the road than on it andthe local Bajaj dealer hasn't been particularly helpful. However, she still takes home up to Rs 150 a day. Like Valsala, Devutty—who is unmarried and is the breadwinner for a family of nine—has had no trouble from either passengers or male drivers. Says she: "My only problems have come from my auto." SC/ST Development Corporation officials have offered to help out.

What has enabled Valsala and Devutty and thousands of other women to break out of traditional roles has been the cumulative effect of the emphasis on education by successive governments and the various tribal welfare schemes. N. Radhakrishnan, assistant director at the Directorate of Scheduled Tribes Development, says education has really been the key: "That tribal men and women have managed to join the mainstream is a credit to our high literacy rate which is, well, nearly cent per cent."

The statistics are indeed impressive. Of the 58 lakh students enrolled in schools in 1993-94, about 28 lakh were female. From the Scheduled Tribes, 62,771 students enrolled in schools—48.4 per cent of them girls. The same year, 53 per cent of the one lakh-plus students in pre-degree were girls. At the graduate level, girls accounted for 56.7 per cent of those admitted; at the masters level, this percentage was 56.2.

The accent on education finds its reflec-tion in the number of women employed both in the private and public sectors—in 1992, it was 42.7 per cent in the former and 30.9 per cent in the latter. Current statistics aren't available but Social Welfare Ministry officials say the figures are much higher.

However, it's women with offbeat jobs who attract attention. The beautiful Akkulam lagoon resort in Thiruvanan-thapuram has a boat club run by a team of 10 Scheduled Caste women from the Uloor panchayat on the outskirts of Thiruvanan-thapuram. They row boats and run speedboats and, on some busy Sundays and holidays, attend to about 3,000 visitors. For theuninitiated, it comes as a surprise to see Sukumari take off on her speedboat for the 4-km ride across the lagoon. Neither she nor the others are from the fishing community—the Tourism Department had to put them through a training programme, which included boating and swimming. Sukumari enjoys her work, though she feels her salary of Rs 650 a month could be improved upon. Says she: "We don't face any problems worth complaining about. At times we get intoxicated men but we know how to handle them."

Jaya, who conducts rides on a safari boat, finds nothing exceptional about her work. "This is work any woman can do. It's a lot more exciting than sitting in an office," she notes. Encouraged by the Akkulam experiment, women have been inducted to manthe boats in the Neyyar dam lake, 40 km off Thiruvananthapuram.

 Why do highly qualified women—or, for that matter, men—in Kerala take on jobs which demand no more than school education? For the simple reason that there are as many as 36 lakh educated jobless on the rolls of the state's employment exchanges. And the numbers swell each academic year. The private sector has had a limited growth and though the Gulf provides some level of employment, it's obviously not quite enough.

And so Sheila—an MA in philosophy, sociology and political science from University College, Thiruvanantha-puram—opts for a job as a city bus conductor. Higher education and conductors? Isn't there a contradiction? No, says Sheila. She feels she is more mature on the job. Her colleague, Suma, who holds a masters in commerce, adds that college education makes her efficient. In fact, there are 12 others with them who are at least graduates. All say their work is exciting and tend to be philosophical about their monthly basic of Rs 900. They only hope they are regularised after their three-year contract ends.

The women conductors get no special privileges, except that they don't go on the night shift. They also operate on the general city service and not solely on 'ladies specials'. Work is an everyday grind from 6 am to 2 pm. But not an unpleasant one: the passengers cooperate and there has been no serious case of eve-teasing. Says Suma: "People seem to respect the uniform. None of us has had any trouble from male passengers. If anybody has asked unpleasant questions, it's the women passengers."

The word 'postwoman' rings no bells, once or twice. It's not even there in the dictionary. Not that P.T. Thresiamma cares. For the last 15 years, she has been doing the rounds in Kozhikode without fuss. In the upper class residential pocket that's her beat, she's widely respected. She walks about 15 km every working day, visiting some 800 homes. She not only delivers letters, she reads and writes them for the unlettered with children in the Gulf. "It's almost like social work. Anyway, what's the point in sitting at home and wasting oneself?" she asks. Thresiamma is married and has two college-going sons.

Women like Thresiamma represent the spirit that guides women in Kerala. It's not that there's no gender bias—the bottomline is the presence of an officially-sponsored platform which helps ordinary women break the shackles of tradition. And the guts to clamber atop that platform.