Narrative series

Women's Odisha

The invisible half — gendered economy, SHGs, health, family resistance, education thresholds, the digital shift.

8 chapters · 39,154 words

Read the series introduction →

Chapters

  1. 01 Chapter 1: The Ledger and the Loom In July 2022, a team from the International Rice Research Institute arrived in Ganjam district to study the effects of heat stress on women rice farmers. They found what anyone who has visited an Odisha village during transplanting season already knows: the paddy fields were full 5,676 words
  2. 02 Chapter 2: The Paper Sarpanch In 2023, a case reached the Orissa High Court from Kalahandi district. The facts were unremarkable: a dispute over the hiring and firing of a Gaon Sathi -- a village-level functionary. What made the case noteworthy was who was doing the hiring and firing. It was not the elected s 4,923 words
  3. 03 Chapter 3: The Body as Battleground Every June, in the middle of the pre-monsoon heat, Odisha celebrates a festival that exists nowhere else in India. Raja Parba -- three days in mid-June -- celebrates the menstruation of the earth. Bhudevi, Mother Earth, is menstruating, and therefore she must rest. All agricultur 3,808 words
  4. 04 Chapter 4: The Resistance from Within In 1848, Savitribai Phule walked to work carrying an extra sari. She was twenty-seven years old, the first woman teacher in colonial India, running a girls' school in Pune with her husband Jotirao. Every morning, on her way to the school, upper-caste neighbours threw cow dung and 5,100 words
  5. 05 Chapter 5: The Threshold In 1951, out of every thousand women in Odisha, twenty-five could read. Not twenty-five percent -- twenty-five per thousand. A female literacy rate of 2.5%. In a population of approximately seven million women, roughly 175,000 could sign their names, read a newspaper, or decode t 5,028 words
  6. 06 Chapter 6: The Network That Already Exists On March 8, 2001 -- International Women's Day, a date chosen with the precision of a political operative who understands symbols -- Naveen Patnaik launched Mission Shakti. The stated objective was financial: form 2 lakh Women Self-Help Groups within two years. Each group would co 4,185 words
  7. 07 Chapter 7: The Smartphone and the Threshold In September 2016, Reliance JIO launched its network with an offer that no competitor could match: free data, free calls, free everything, for months. The price of mobile data in India collapsed from approximately Rs 250 per gigabyte to Rs 10. Within eighteen months, India went f 4,443 words
  8. 08 Chapter 8: The Invisible Half Twelve series. Approximately 545,000 words. Politics, economy, infrastructure, culture, migration, tribal governance, disaster management, digital transformation, identity, the diaspora, the churning fire of consciousness. Twelve attempts to explain how Odisha works -- how power 5,991 words

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.