By Aarushee Shukla & Anshu Kumari
At 5 am, Richa is wide awake. By 6, the house is clean, the floors are mopped, and tea is brewed for everyone. By 8, lunch is slow-cooked on a wood fire, three or four dishes, the gas cylinder saved for when guests arrive. By 9.30, after bathing, praying and feeding everyone in the family, she finally eats. Last, just like clockwork. Richa doesn’t complain about this order. She calls it a rule that needs to be followed.
Richa is not the woman we are usually taught to pity. She is, by every contemporary policy metric, an empowered woman. For the past 10 years, she has been part of a self-help group that gives her access to a revolving fund: small loans, low interest, no moneylender. Three years ago, she also became a beneficiary of the Jal Jeevan Hariyali project, under which the Bihar government granted her and six other women legal rights over a pond for five years without any rent. They cultivate fish, sell them in the market, deposit earnings within their fish producer group account called ‘Shakti Jeevika Mahila Fish Producer Group’, and receive their share. Richa says with immense pride, as she should, that there is more dignity in her household now. She takes the names of different cities she has travelled to as part of her official work outside of her village. She talks highly of her connections and networks she has built with women, and how she is on top of all the information. She is paying for her children’s education and coaching, and shares how she is consulted in family decisions now. And yet, she eats last.
This is a story of what empowerment in India actually looks like and where it quietly stops. In a recent column in The Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta argues that equality is not merely a moral aspiration but a structural necessity. High inequality, he writes, corrodes social trust, weakens growth, entrenches privilege, and reproduces deprivation. Capital does not simply reward talent; it also reflects historical exclusion. Those who possess it do so within a structure that systematically denies others access to it.
Richa’s life experience, at first glance, tends to vindicate this argument. Once she gets access to capital — financial, social, and legal — through the SHG and the pond, her life circumstances change drastically. She escaped the shaukars who charged 5-10 per cent interest for loans, she gained dignity within her family, and her confidence escalated, as did her self-worth. With a steady income, her household began to take her seriously. But being consulted for decisions is not the same as having the power to make decisions, and bringing money to the table is not the same as having the free will and capacity to spend it. Because when Richa finishes all the housework and cooking for the entire family, all by herself, she still waits and eats at last.
What her story reveals is not a contradiction to Mehta’s argument but rather an exposure of its limitations. Redistribution of capital can undeniably alter women’s relations to the market and the state, but it does not automatically alter their relationship to the home.
Development policies have now learned how to insert women into the market and production sphere without paying much heed to the moral economy of care. While the state has become much more accepting of and comfortable with granting rights to women over ponds, goats, bank accounts, and savings groups, it is far less willing to intervene within the household, in the kitchens, or in the dining order.
Food is not incidental here. Feminist scholars have long argued that food allocation is one of the most significant expressions of hierarchy inside households. Who is allowed to eat first reflects the worthiness of the individuals whose time matters, whose labour is visible, and whose sacrifice is normalised. Richa does all the household caregiving chores, works outside, and brings money to the table. When we ask her how her life has changed, she proudly responds that she is treated with reverence inside the house, which leaves us thinking about how her life was before this, then? For us, her ‘empowerment’ has expanded responsibilities faster than it has expanded her rights.
When asked whether it bothers her that she eats after everyone else, Richa responds with confusion in her voice, almost as if our question was redundant, “It’s a rule.” A rule so naturalised that it is no longer questioned, problematised, or considered negotiable. This is where the language of empowerment begins to falter. Much of the development discourse rests on the assumption that once women gain assets, namely, land, income, skills, and other forms of inequality will start being challenged and will eventually cease to exist. Autonomy will deepen, and decision-making power will follow. Richa’s lived experience complicates this optimism.
She believes that education is more important than property, especially for girls, so that they may be married well, and yet she got her daughter married while she was in grade 12. When we ask her whether daughters should own property, she laughs. “How can girls have property?” This is not ignorance; it is social realism. Richa understands which claims are permissible and which are not, where her assertion will be awarded and where it will invite punishment. If we change our lens, eating last can look more like a strategy than a submission.
For policymakers, Richa’s life is a success story; for economists, it demonstrates the returns to collective action and asset ownership. For feminists, however, it poses an uncomfortable question: What kind of empowerment leaves household hierarchies untouched? The answer is not to dismiss schemes; these interventions matter, and they are bringing about sizable changes. They are redistributing risk, reducing exploitation, and creating real material changes. Richa herself says life is better, and we must believe her. We must also refuse to romanticise this improvement as ultimate liberation. Because empowerment that does not problematise who eats first is empowerment with strings attached — to patriarchy and other hegemonic structures.
Mehta warns us that inequality reproduces itself by shaping institutions, norms, and expectations. Richa’s story shows us how this reproduction happens not only in the markets and the state but also within homes through everyday rituals that are branded as apolitical because they are intimate. ‘Empowerment’ asks women to carry development on their shoulders while leaving patriarchy comfortably seated at the table. If equality is social trust, as Mehta suggests, then trust must begin where labour is most taken for granted, not in the pond but at the dining table.
Aarushee is a PhD scholar at JNU and Anshu is a gender consultant
National Editor Shalini Langer curates the fortnightly ‘She Said’ column
If equality is social trust, as Mehta suggests, then trust must begin where labour is most taken for granted, not in the pond, but at the dining table.
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