Last summer, the two of us spent several weeks in rural Madhya Pradesh with a non-profit that works on gender justice through women’s self-help groups. We went in with a notebook full of laws. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act. The Dowry Prohibition Act. Free legal aid for every woman under the Legal Services Authorities Act. A One Stop Centre in every district. On paper, a village woman today has more legal protection than her mother ever had.

It took us some time to see that our notebook was answering the wrong question. A woman who is beaten at home does not ask which section of which Act applies to her. Her question is much plainer. Who can I talk to? Where do I go? And what will happen to me once I go?

 

Too often, the system does not have a clear answer for her. That distance, between a right written in law and a woman’s ability to actually use it, is where Indian gender policy is weakest. It is also where the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) is best placed to act.

 

The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) found that 29.3% of ever-married women aged 18 to 49 had faced violence from their husbands. Only 14% of women who had experienced any kind of physical or sexual violence ever sought help from anyone. About 77% never sought help and never told a single person. Among the few who did reach out, most turned to their own families. The police came far behind.

 

We usually read these figures as proof that women are not aware of their rights. That is only partly correct and it lets the system off too lightly. A right is only as useful as the path that leads to it. 

 

If the path is long, unclear, costly and, frightening most women would not take it, no matter how aware they are. 

 

NRLM’s Gender Operational Strategy already commits the mission to gender equality, protection from violence and the empowerment of rural women. And NRLM has something few government programmes have: reach. Close to ten crore women are organised into self-help groups, village organizations and cluster federations across the country.

 

The gender architecture built on this network looks impressive. The Ministry of Rural Development and the national mission sit at the top. State missions have gender teams. Districts have mission units that are meant to coordinate with the District Collector, the One Stop Centre, the District Legal Services Authority and child protection units. At the block and cluster level there are Gender Resource Centers and gender justice centers, linked to ICDS and social action committees. At the bottom are village organisations, gender forums and a cadre of community women trained as ‘Gender Jaankars’, called ‘Samta Sakhis’ in some places.

 

The trouble is that this structure gets thinner at every step down, and it is thinnest exactly where the woman stands.

 

In the field, the gaps were not hard to find. Much of the gender work runs on goodwill. Payments to community workers are irregular and often tied to individual cases, which makes the role hard to sustain. Some resource centres have no fixed room, so a woman looking for help cannot simply walk to a known door. Local permissions to run sessions take time and sometimes have to be sought again. Travel is difficult for the women who need help and for the Jaankars who try to reach them. When trained staff leave, the trust they built leaves with them. Training differs from one organisation to the next, and the data is too thin to tell anyone what is working.

 

Social pressure adds another layer. Many women cannot leave the house without the permission of their family, which rules out a training session or a visit to the block office. Stigma and fear make the police station feel like the last place to go. Even a woman who chooses to become a Gender Jaankar Didi can face resistance from her own family members for taking a public role and venturing out. Difficulties of the legal language make it worse. Many women do not what happens to them counts as violence, and those who have heard of a law rarely know the next step. 

 

The most useful thing we saw was the role of Gender Jaankar didi, who acts as bridge for the rural women to help them access their legal rights and remedies. The organisation we worked with uses SHG networks to find and train women from the same communities. In some places, the Jaankars sit close to the formal institutions like a police station. A woman who is unsure what to do has someone she already knows to talk first. Counselling by the Jaankar Didi gives her room to think before she decides whether to file a complaint or seek a referral. A shared background makes trust easier to build, and the Jaankar becomes the bridge between the village and the institutions that otherwise feel distant for these women. 

 

But the Jaankar model runs into the same problems as everything else, such as money, training, incentives, permissions, space, travel and continuity. The lesson is that the last-mile only works when the system above it keeps supporting it, year after year.

 

First, the gender strategy should name access as a goal in its own right. It is not enough to count how many women attended an awareness session. The mission should keep a track of how many women who sought help actually reached a counselor, a legal aid lawyer or a one stop center, and what happened next for those cases. Legal literacy should be treated as part of empowerment, the same way financial literacy already is. 

 

Second, the gender work needs its own budget inside NRLM and state missions. Community cadres like the Jender Jaankars should get a fixed honorarium, proper training and a certification that carries weight, instead of a payments system which is based on the number of cases they close.  

 

Third, every Gender Resource Centre should have a permanent, signposted place, and someone should check that it is open. A woman should never have to ask around to find it. 

 

Fourth, the referral chain needs to be written down. Who does the Jaankar call first? What is the police station expected to do? And what about the legal services authority and the One Stop Centre? A name contact at each step would remove the guesswork that now sends women back home.

 

Finally, the awareness material should be designed in the local language and should always specify what women can do next and where she can go, not just mentioning the rights that exist on paper. 

 

Videos and digital tools can carry this further, but they work best alongside the Jaankar and the SHG meeting, not as a substitute for a person she can trust. 

 

India does not lack laws to protect women. What it lacks is a short, safe and visible path from those laws to a woman’s front door. NRLM already reaches that door. The test of its gender strategy should be simple: can a woman in a village answer the question “where do I go?” without leaving her to find out?