Abstract
NGOs have played key roles in catalysing change within development activities in India. It is widely perceived that NGOs have a greater capacity to reach the grassroots, even in case of women's organisation. However, such groups working with women need to ensure that class, caste and ethnic differences are included in their analyses of women and development. Postmodern thinking has fostered a growing awareness of an absence of race and class analysis in mainstream feminist discourse on development.
Mahila Smakhya (MS), an organisation working in several states of India, empha sises development with gender equity. There is no single, unique set of policy or action recommendations that can achieve this. One effective way to do this may be to create space for the voices of 'ordinary' men and women to be heard within the policy domain so that commonalties and conflicts between different groups of women and men are made clear and taken into account in the policy development process. This paper looks at MS's success in Madhya Pradesh.
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