A massive experiment in the State of Kerala, India, points the way to a new political order in terms of global governance from below, to ensure the empowerment of women, in a wide-reaching and sustainable manner.
The experiment, Kudumbashree, has nearly 300,000 neighbourhood groups of women in poverty-risk, reaching nearly half the families of the State. The groups are federated at three levels of local governance. These groups of women-in-poverty-risk, put together, have a financial outlay bigger than that of any corporate house in the State. And due to such groups, in a State where women were not encouraged to socialize much outside their homes, more women got elected to the local governance body than men, in the last two successive elections.
