India’s parched fields yield rich crop of women cops

CONSTABLE Meena Ghodke may be in the bottom rank of her local police force but it is the highest anyone has climbed in her village – man or woman – and she could not be prouder.

Not for Ghodke the usual wrench from school to farm work, early marriage and motherhood. Part of a wave of young village women who want more from life, the 26-year-old had plans. “I didn’t want to work as a farm labourer or marry,” said Ghodke.

Ghodke has worked for almost four years as a constable and is currently in Beed’s anti-human trafficking unit. Beed lies in Maharashtra’s parched Marathwada region where years of drought have ravaged crops, forcing farmers to migrate and fuelling a demand for brides to work alongside their men, so the family earns more.

“My elder sister got married when she was in seventh grade (aged 14). There were five other girls with me in school who, too, dropped out to get married and work as farm labour. I didn’t want that for myself,” Ghodke said.

So when Ghodke spotted a police recruitment advert in a local paper, her escape plan hatched. At the time, she was battling family pressure to wed but pleaded with her father to allow her to sit the test, then arrange her a marriage if she failed.

Maharashtra began setting aside one in three police posts for women more than two decades ago, and today it employs almost 20% of the overall 100 000 women constables across India, showing the highest ratio of any state.

In Beed, more than 3 500 women have applied for the 100 or so police jobs advertised from 2014 to 2018, police data shows.

Of a batch of 630 women constables trained at a police training centre in Maharashtra’s Solapur district, most were from villages, officials said.

Desperation drove them on. Meeran Borwankar – who retired from the elite Indian Police Service (IPS) in 2017 – recalled a recruitment drive for constables she ran in 1996 as a local superintendent.

“Not a single girl qualified. They were thin and weak,” she said, then recounted a similar and more recent recruitment drive when “girls came in dozens. They were physically fit, agile and motivated. They were so overjoyed when they became constables.”