The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Extend Antyodaya scheme benefits to all single women: CPI(M)

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Sunday, Sep 13, 2009
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Extend Antyodaya scheme benefits to all single women: CPI(M)

Staff Reporter

RAJAPALAYAM: The benefits of the Antyodaya Anna Yojana, which ensures supply of 35 kg rice a month at the rate of Rs.2 to widows, should be extended to all single women and families headed by women, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) demanded on Saturday.

Addressing a conference of single women organised by the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) here, its patron and MP, Brinda Karat, said that the Supreme Court had directed all the States to give the Antyodaya scheme benefits to widows. Around 3.4 crore women in the country lived alone, because of widowhood or migration or abandonment by husbands. And one-fourth of the families were headed by women.

Tripura scheme

Ms. Karat said that the women’s movement must create an impact to change government policies for the benefit of single women. She pointed out that the Left government in Tripura was extending Rs.300 as monthly assistance for women deserted by their husbands. “It is a gesture just to say that society and the government have the responsibility to stand by such women.”

Deploring the cultural practices and rituals that made widows and single women “inauspicious,” she said such women were making all possible sacrifices for the survival of their families and children. They were the most auspicious mortals for development of the country.

Though individual men were to be blamed for the cruelty faced by women, she said it was the culture that inculcated in men that they had the right to subject women to cruelty. “A woman who is made victim of circumstances of tragedy is made a victim of cruelty by society.”

Stating that society refused to see the reality of women’s pain, she said only through continuous struggles that a special law was enacted to deal with dowry deaths, which used to be dismissed as “accidents” due to stove burst in the 1970s.

AIDWA State general secretary U. Vasuki wanted the government to play the role of facilitator to help single women stand on their own by providing them opportunities for education, job and government welfare schemes.

Providing ration cards to single women, priority in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, sanction of widow pension to all eligible women without any age criterion and right for women to share wealth created by husbands after marriage were some of the issues on which resolutions were adopted at the conference.

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