The standing committee of the All-India Women’s Conference will meet in Kolkata to celebrate its 84th year on January 8, and this is quite a feat in longevity and service. With over 500 branches and consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council, as well as a steadily growing membership of over 100,000, the conference is the oldest such organisation in the country.
However, with more professionally-run and donor-funded NGOs taking the limelight, be it in tribal rights, AIDS awareness or taking care of the elderly, the question often mooted is: are such organisations still relevant? Do models based on volunteerism — be it mobile creches or the Indian Council for Child Welfare — still work? These organisations were built by women who gladly gave their time after fulfilling duties as homemakers; now professionals with degrees from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the School of Oriental and African Studies, Johns Hopkins, etc, who churn out spreadsheets and flow charts with the databases of funding agencies on their BlackBerrys and iPhones, hold sway.
But be it Florence Nightingale or Mother Teresa, these so-called “underqualified” women propelled by a “vocation” have left a great impact on our life and times. Women like Ashoka Gupta, Kamaladevi Chattop-adhyaya, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Rameshwari Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Lakshmi Menon and its current crop of Padma Bhushan, Sarojini Varadappan and Shobana Ranade, have built the AIWC.
The AIWC’s founder, an Englishwoman named Margaret Cousins, was another such woman who answered a call to organise women’s emancipation in January 1927 in what was then called Poona. Their mission was to impart education and free thought to prepare them, as it were, for the bugle call of the nation’s freedom struggle. Bina Jain, herself a grassroots worker and the AIWC’s current president argued that both tradition and volunteerism do have a place even in the India of today. While younger donor-driven organisations can flourish, the AIWC has longevity — a clinching argument when applied to current personality-driven NGOs with not-so-long histories.
In keeping with today’s needs, the AIWC has taken an important new initiative to train women in retail, to develop a community college for the underprivileged, and to propagate renewable and solar energy, in addition to managing its early mandate of working women’s hostels, widows’ homes, lepers’ homes and even computer literacy courses.
The National Commission for Women was also established in 1992 as a statutory body, due to the persistence and struggles of women’s organisations, just as in the past the AIWC played a significant legislative role in ensuring the provision of universal adult franchise as well as the passage of the Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929, popularly known as the Sarda Act, the Hindu Code Bill (1955-56), the Devdasi Protection Act (1934), the Factory and Mines Act (1948/1987), Maternity Benefits Act (1961), and the like. It pioneered educational institutions in 1932 (AIWEFA), led to the establishment of Lady Irwin College, India’s first college of home sciences for women; the Family Planning Centre, established in 1937, which is now the Family Planning Association of India; Save the Children Committee, established in 1943, now the Indian Council for Child Welfare; and the Cancer Research Institute, established in 1952, now the Cancer Institute, Chennai.
The women who created these institutions also selflessly dedicated themselves to the cause of improving the lives of people in India’s villages and urban slums. So while we celebrate the “career social worker”, let’s not ignore a century’s contribution by women who remain unsung and uncelebrated for their service to the nation.

Manju Kak is an author, women’s activist and cultural historian