Empowering Rural Women: The Mahila Samakhya Programme

In 1988, the Indian government launched a quiet experiment in ten backward districts of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Karnataka. Instead of handing out literacy textbooks or vocational certificates, it asked rural women to gather in small village groups and simply talk about their lives. That experiment became the Mahila Samakhya Programme, and nearly four decades later, it remains one of the most studied examples of using education as a tool for social change rather than just skill-building.

What the Mahila Samakhya Programme set out to do
Objectives and strategy
Who the programme was built for
The Sangham as the working unit
Impact: building an enabling environment
Beyond the classroom
A test of loyalty from the women themselves
Challenges that limited its scale
Integration with the Self-Help Group movement
Why this case still matters for adult education

What the Mahila Samakhya Programme set out to do

The programme grew out of the National Policy on Education, 1986, which recognised that girls and women could not meaningfully participate in schooling unless the deeper social barriers holding them back were addressed first. Mahila Samakhya was designed to test that idea in the field, starting in 1988 and eventually expanding to eleven states covering more than a hundred districts.

Its founding assumption was simple: education is not only about reading and writing. It is about self-esteem, the ability to question unfair treatment, and the confidence to make decisions that were previously made for you. The programme’s own framework listed goals such as building a positive image of women’s contribution to society, enabling informed choices in health and employment, and providing the knowledge needed for economic independence.

Objectives and strategy

Who the programme was built for

Mahila Samakhya deliberately targeted the women who were furthest from the education system. Government records describe its core participants as women from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities, landless families, and households dependent on daily wage labour, groups that remained the most alienated from schooling and government schemes even decades after independence, according to the programme’s genesis document.

The Sangham as the working unit

The strategy centred on the Sangham (also spelt Sangha), a village-level collective of women who met regularly to discuss shared problems and plan joint action. Rather than being run top-down by officials, each Sangham functioned as a space where dialogue, learning, and collective decision-making happened on the women’s own terms. This was a deliberate departure from earlier adult literacy drives, which treated women as passive recipients of a fixed curriculum instead of active participants shaping their own priorities.

Sanghams took on names that reflected their own aspirations, and their agendas were rarely limited to reading and writing. A single meeting might move from discussing a delayed pension payment to planning a protest against a local liquor shop to organising a savings pool. Education, in the Mahila Samakhya sense, meant the confidence to question, critically analyse issues, and seek solutions rather than accept them as given.

Impact: building an enabling environment

Over time, the programme diversified into several distinct strands of work. According to a detailed breakdown by GKToday, these included non-formal education and adult literacy classes; health and nutrition awareness, particularly around reproductive health; economic activities such as savings and credit groups; legal literacy workshops that helped women navigate domestic violence and property disputes; and encouragement to contest or vote in Panchayati Raj elections.

Beyond the classroom

Perhaps the most striking impact was on how women saw their own place in public life. Historically excluded from institutional spaces, many Sangham members went on to take up leadership roles in local governance and community dispute resolution. A 2016 review in the Economic and Political Weekly noted that the programme had made significant contributions to women’s empowerment over roughly twenty-five years of operation, reaching about 42,000 villages across the country by 2014.

A test of loyalty from the women themselves

The strength of that attachment became visible in December 2015, when the central government considered folding Mahila Samakhya into the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. In response, roughly a hundred thousand postcards from Sangham women arrived at the Prime Minister’s office asking that the programme continue independently, as documented in an academic account of the movement. Few government schemes generate that kind of grassroots defence, and it says something about how personally the participants valued the space the Sanghams gave them.

Challenges that limited its scale

Success on the ground did not translate into administrative security. The programme relied heavily on external funding, first from the Dutch government and later Britain’s Department for International Development, and its future was repeatedly uncertain once that support became less assured. GKToday’s assessment points to limited funding, bureaucratic hurdles, and uneven implementation across different states as recurring problems, with some regions building far more robust Sangham networks than others.

There was also a structural tension. A programme built around slow, participatory processes, letting women set their own pace and priorities, does not fit neatly into the fixed targets and annual budget cycles that most government schemes are measured against. Officials wanted measurable outcomes; the Sangham model was designed to produce something harder to quantify, namely women’s agency. This mismatch was a recurring theme in the programme’s own internal reviews, including the 2013 Joint Review Mission report, which flagged the need to keep gender training current and to make fuller use of resources available through other rural development schemes.

Integration with the Self-Help Group movement

As microfinance-based Self-Help Groups spread rapidly across rural India through NABARD’s bank-linkage model and later the National Rural Livelihoods Mission, Mahila Samakhya’s Sanghams increasingly overlapped with this parallel movement. The 2013 review mission itself recommended that Mahila Samakhya states actively explore resources available under the National Rural Livelihoods Mission and other employment schemes rather than working in isolation.

This convergence made practical sense. Sanghams had already done the hard work of building trust and collective identity among women who Self-Help Groups often struggled to reach, particularly those from marginalised and landless households. Linking that existing social capital to formal credit and livelihood support gave women a route from collective awareness to collective income generation. Research on Self-Help Groups more broadly shows that linking women’s collectives to structured financial support has measurable effects on household income, women’s health spending, and labour force participation, which is exactly the kind of outcome the SHG-Mahila Samakhya convergence aimed for.

When Mahila Samakhya was formally wound down as an independent centrally sponsored scheme in 2014, this convergence became its most durable legacy. Many Sanghams did not simply disappear; they continued functioning as self-sustained collectives or transitioned into Self-Help Group structures. According to GKToday, the programme’s participatory and rights-based framework went on to influence the National Rural Livelihoods Mission and other gender-focused schemes that came after it, even after its own name disappeared from the government’s scheme list.

Why this case still matters for adult education

Mahila Samakhya is frequently studied in rural development and adult education courses because it illustrates a genuine trade-off. Programmes that prioritise participation and slow, community-led change tend to produce deeper, more durable empowerment outcomes, but they are also harder to scale, fund consistently, and evaluate using standard bureaucratic metrics. The postcard campaign, the uneven implementation across states, and the eventual merger into broader livelihood missions all reflect that same tension playing out in real time.

For students of rural development administration, the bigger lesson is about design choice. Should empowerment programmes be run as tightly measured, target-driven schemes, or as loosely structured spaces where change is allowed to happen at its own pace? Mahila Samakhya chose the second path, and its three decades of operation offer a rare, well-documented answer to what that choice actually produces on the ground.

What do you think? Does the Mahila Samakhya model of letting women set their own pace and priorities work better for empowerment than fixed, target-driven schemes? And now that its Sanghams have largely folded into the Self-Help Group and livelihoods framework, has something essential about the original vision been lost, or simply carried forward in a different form?

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References

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Table of Contents

What the Mahila Samakhya Programme set out to do 🔗

Objectives and strategy 🔗

Who the programme was built for 🔗

The Sangham as the working unit 🔗

Impact: building an enabling environment 🔗

Beyond the classroom 🔗

A test of loyalty from the women themselves 🔗

Challenges that limited its scale 🔗

Integration with the Self-Help Group movement 🔗

Why this case still matters for adult education 🔗