ABSTRACT
Over the 1990s and 2000s, the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) developed methods to successfully organize where the greatest numbers of Indian women lived: both in rural and urban areas. It accomplished its substantial increase in membership numbers while the Indian state and economy moved toward the neoliberal “free market” policies. In the first ten years, the organization grew from 590,000 women at its founding convention in 1981 to 2,876,000 in 1991. Ten years later, in 2001, this number had more than doubled to 5,950,000 members. By the end of this study, in 2006, there were ten million women who composed AIDWA from every state in the country. The numbers tell of careful work on the ground, building from successful local campaigns for affordable food, fair working conditions, and basic equality through demanding laws for women's right to live without violence. The lives of the women who joined AIDWA live within a economic context that relies upon their expendability, an economy of “disposable people.”
