Tokenism vs. Transformation: Are Pashu Sakhis Being Empowered or Exploited?
- TGT GLOBAL Development services
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
In rural India, the role of Pashu Sakhis—community-based animal health workers—has been widely promoted as a powerful intervention for livestock development and women's empowerment. However, beneath the surface of success stories and training reports lies a complex and often overlooked reality. Are Pashu Sakhis truly being empowered as rural change agents or are they being tokenized within a fragile system that fails to support their long-term growth?
The Promise of Empowerment
The Pashu Sakhi model was designed with dual goals: improving access to livestock services at the grassroots level and creating sustainable livelihood opportunities for rural women. Armed with knowledge in animal health, feeding, breeding and ethno-veterinary practices, these women bridge critical service gaps in underserved areas.
On paper, the model appears ideal:
Low-cost, decentralized service delivery
Gender empowerment through skill-building
Strengthened community resilience in livestock farming
Yet, many Pashu Sakhis find themselves navigating a system that often values visibility over viability.
Where Tokenism Creeps In
Despite extensive training and fieldwork, many Pashu Sakhis remain:
Underpaid or unpaid for services
Lacking recognition in formal veterinary systems
Dependent on project-based incentives with no continuity
Excluded from decision-making roles in local livestock governance
While they are showcased in donor reports and social media as examples of grassroots innovation, the ground reality often reflects a stark mismatch between their responsibilities and the institutional support they receive.
Invisible Labor, Visible Impact
Pashu Sakhis are frequently expected to:
Mobilize communities for animal health camps
Perform basic treatments and vaccination
Educate farmers on best practices
Collect data and maintain records
This labor is essential but rarely compensated in line with the workload or its impact. Their work is often labeled as “voluntary”, reducing their identity to that of community workers rather than skilled professionals. The result is burnout, disillusionment and eventually, dropout.
Barriers to Real Empowerment
Some of the key structural challenges include:
Lack of formal accreditation or recognition from veterinary/respective departments
No structured income model, making sustainability impossible after project closure
Limited access to markets, tools or medicines
Cultural resistance and gender bias, particularly from male farmers or local vets
Without addressing these barriers, the program risks becoming a form of gendered tokenism—where women are visible, but not truly valued.
Pathways to Transformation
To ensure that Pashu Sakhis are empowered and not exploited, the following shifts are needed:
Institutional Recognition: Integrate Pashu Sakhis into formal animal health systems with certification, ID cards and legal scope of work.
Livelihood Linkages: Develop models that allow them to earn from livestock services, sale of inputs, insurance facilitation and veterinary products.
Capacity Building + Mentorship: Move beyond one-time training to continuous learning, exposure visits and support networks.
Policy Advocacy: Engage with local and state governments to allocate budgets and create long-term schemes for community livestock workers.
Data-Driven Accountability: Use field evidence to monitor impact, track payments and document success stories to prevent the invisibilization of their contribution.
The Pashu Sakhi model stands at a crossroads. It can either evolve into a transformative rural empowerment strategy or remain a well-meaning but hollow example of tokenism. True transformation will require more than just training and visibility—it will demand structural change, sustainable income models and genuine recognition of their role in the livestock economy. Only then will Pashu Sakhis move from being symbols of inclusion to agents of systemic change.
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