There are many things many of us take for granted, so much so that we rarely pause to think about what they mean to someone living a very different life. Even the most ordinary things can mean something entirely different depending on where and how you live.
Take the toilet. It is so basic, so ordinary, that we barely give it a thought. It is simply there.
But what happens when that basic necessity simply isn’t there? Imagine a young woman in a very different setting. Let us call her Lalmunia. She is nineteen years old and has just been married to a young, healthy man from a nearby village. The wedding is over. Everyone is happy. She has arrived at her new home and is beginning her first night as a married woman. At some point that night, Lalmunia needs to pee. She looks for the toilet. There isn’t one.
Her husband shyly tells her that there is no toilet in the house. She will have to go to the nearby field, land that belongs to another family. She must go quietly, relieve herself, and return before anyone notices. If someone from the family that owns the field sees her, they may shout at her, abuse her, or tell her to leave.
And this is not just about that one night.
From now on, Lalmunia has to think about when she can pee, when she can defecate, whether there is enough darkness, whether someone might be watching, and whether she has someone to accompany her. She cannot simply walk into a bathroom whenever she needs to. Daylight is no longer just daylight. An empty field is no longer just an empty field. Going to the toilet is no longer a simple bodily act.
For her, the toilet is not merely a toilet. What looks like a basic, almost invisible part of everyday life to one person can mean privacy, safety, and dignity to another.
Lalmunia was not one girl. In 2014, there were roughly 11 crore rural households in India without a toilet. Behind that number were crores of women like Lalmunia for whom going to the toilet was not a private, ordinary act, but something that had to be planned around darkness, safety, other people’s land, and the possibility of being seen.
Someone eventually decided that Lalmunia’s situation could not simply be accepted as the way things were. In 2014, Narendra Modi made sanitation a national priority through the Swachh Bharat and Har Ghar Toilet Mission, with the goal of bringing toilets to every rural household and ending open defecation. In the years that followed, more than 10 crore household toilets were constructed under the rural mission.
This is one of the ways Modi empowered women, practised feminism and smashed patriarchy, not through slogans, not through speeches or writing theses, but simply by doing what needed to be done.
Let’s read another story, this time about another woman. Let’s call her Lalmunia ki Mai, the mother of Lalmunia.
Lalmunia ki Mai sells vegetables in a nearby town. She takes a small amount of cash to the mandi, buys vegetables and sells them at retail. She has no bank account and little access to formal credit. When she needs money, she borrows from a moneylender at high interest. Her business remains small because she cannot access affordable capital.
Whatever she earns, she hands over to her husband. For her own needs, she has to ask him for money. She earns, but she does not control her earnings. If government support is available, it rarely reaches her directly. And we all know what used to happen to government money on the way. 85% of it simply vanished!
Then came the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana in 2014. For women like Lalmunia ki Mai, who earned money but had little control over it, a bank account in her own name changed the equation. By 2026, nearly 59 crore Jan Dhan accounts had been opened, of which more than 32 crores were held by women. Banking was no longer something meant only for people with formal jobs, large savings, or connections.
Direct Benefit Transfer took this a step further. Aadhar and Mobile linkages helped. Government benefits could now go directly into a woman’s bank account instead of passing through layers of intermediaries.
Schemes such as Ujjwala also put a basic household necessity, a cooking-gas connection, directly in the hands of women, with more than 10 crore connections provided to poor households.
PM Awas Yojana strengthened women’s economic and social security by encouraging or requiring homes to be registered in women’s names, giving millions of women a formal asset, greater security and a stronger say within the household.
The Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana went a step further by giving small entrepreneurs access to collateral-free institutional credit. By 2025, more than 50 crore loans had been sanctioned, with women accounting for around 70% of the loan accounts.
The Lakhpati Didi initiative seeks to help rural women in self-help groups raise their annual household income to at least 1 lakh rupees through skills, enterprise, and access to finance. More than 3 crore women had become Lakhpati Didis.
This is what real empowerment looks like: not merely telling women to be liberated, but giving them privacy, a bank account, direct access to money, and greater control over everyday choices.
This is where Rahul Gandhi’s language of “smashing patriarchy”, including his recent remarks in Pune, represents a very different idea of women’s empowerment. It starts from the assumption that women everywhere are primarily trapped in a social order controlled by fathers, husbands, and sons, and that liberation therefore means breaking these structures of control.
But for crores of women like Lalmunia or Lalmunia ki Mai, the barriers may be much more concrete: no toilet, no bank account, no independent access to money, no house in her name, no affordable credit, and no opportunity to expand her livelihood. Her empowerment begins when these constraints are removed.
There is something elitist about assuming emancipation must first be expressed through ideological slogans. A woman who gets a toilet, a bank account, a house in her own name, a gas connection, a business loan, or money directly into her account gains something tangible.
That is a different, more grounded idea of feminism. It does not ask a woman to declare herself free. It gives her the means to exercise that freedom herself.
Let me conclude. Lalmunia’s husband loves her. These days, he sometimes asks her if she can spare some cash. And Lalmunia, if she is in a good mood, simply smiles and transfers the money to his phone through UPI. That, too, is what empowerment looks like: the freedom to say yes or no, and to have some money that is strictly her own.
(The author is a Senior Adviser at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
