These days Bhanupriya Rao, 48, is obsessed with how women utilise their time. Thanks to the sporadic Time Use Survey released by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), we know that women devote three times the amount of time that men do to unpaid domestic work. But that’s not enough for the founder of Behen Box, an independent news organisation founded after the 2019 general election that spotlights how policies and laws affect women and gender diverse people. She wants to know how much time women spend on leisure.

“An ASHA worker’s time use looks completely different to my time use. A contractual worker spends her time differently from a farmer, a rural woman from an urban woman, a woman who has a full-time job and also takes care of a disabled child vs. one who takes care of a non-disabled child,” she says. “So how do we document these differences — and then make it into a data set?”

When one of her reporters chanced upon a woman, positioned on the edge of her kitchen counter, watching a Marathi TV series as she prepared a meal, it prompted Rao and her team to ask, “How is she negotiating leisure?”

Raising hard questions

Whether it’s exploring beauty parlours in Jharkhand or weighing the freedom of gig work against its inherently exploitative structure, the stories on Behen Box offer great insight into the inner lives of women. What happens when women have cancer? How do Adivasi survivors of sexual violence access justice? Why are fertility practices killing women?

It is questions like these, with which we don’t usually engage, that led Rao to a deep examination of ASHA workers, the volunteer army of female health workers who were on the frontline during the COVID-19 pandemic. Behen Box collected qualitative data from 52 health workers across 16 states in 2020. Their research found heroes who were abused, invisibilised, and desperately underpaid. Many had huge debts. “It’s still the only data available about ASHA workers,” she says. Rao’s past association with the Right To Food and Right to Information movements has been key to her understanding that information is crucial to live as equal citizens.

Behen Box looks at women as agents of change, and closely tracks the battles they navigate. “There’s a lot more awareness of women not wanting to live with the status quo, and that gives us hope,” says Rao, adding that all the Adivasi protests, for example, are led by women. “That is why we document all the resistance movements, they tell us what women want.”

Women provide perennial inspiration for Rao, the daughter of a geologist and a teacher. Thanks to her father’s job, she grew up in mining towns in states such as Bihar, Orissa and Chattisgarh. “Women’s lives are not singular,” she says. “We live so many different lives.” She catches glimpses of her life in that of her subjects and, in turn, draws from them. “Writing and learning about the lives of these women made me more sure of myself. In my own eyes I started to exist. They helped show me who I really am,” she says.

Similarly, when a doctor told her that she could no longer cycle and that she should swim instead, the journey of conquering her fear of water helped her confidence as a solo founder. The once-aspiring historian had no experience running a newsroom. “I realised how I could apply swimming to my work life. If I could swim, I could run Behen Box. If I could get over the fear of deep water, I could float through the financial issues I was facing.”

A space to belong

Rao knows that women are aspirational, their lives are not static. “You can’t imagine them the way they were even a decade ago,” she says. “That’s a very wrong representation.” She would disagree — or at least add a caveat — with those who say that families don’t support women.

In Haryana, for example, while regressive attitudes may prevail and the end goal continues to be marriage, there is support for working women. “It’s when you’ve turned 25 and you haven’t found a job that there is pressure on women to marry unless they are doing something economically viable,” she says. “That’s where the state providing jobs for women comes into play.” So why not hold the state accountable before blaming family?

Behen Box started off by telling us what the lives of Indian women look like but somewhere along the way, the women took over. “Now they own it,” says Rao. “The attitude is, we will come to you because we trust you and you will represent us properly. This space belongs to us.” Many women in the informal economy, whose issues are glaringly absent from the mainstream and from public policy, have thanked Rao for visibilising them.

Indian women, as they are wont to, keep providing insights. “There is a lot of assertion from women from marginalised groups, which we are not paying attention to,” says Rao. “It’s positive but it shouldn’t be their burden. The structures supporting our democracy need to make the system easier so that these women are able to lead fuller lives, to love, to work.”

The writer is a Bengaluru-based journalist and the co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram.