COLUMN ONE : Women Unite, Give India a Jolt : Grass-roots groups have sprung up in rural villages with hopes of making brutish lives better. They cut through the notorious bureaucracy with a simple philosophy--don’t wait for the men to act.

In the Madurai district, they still talk with wonder about how the women of this village, miles from the nearest paved road, dared take things into their own hands.

Sadachipatti has only one pump for drinking water, and it frequently breaks down. When villagers complain, it takes as long as five days for authorities to send somebody to fix it.

Meanwhile, the women have to trudge a quarter of a mile to a canal, fill up their heavy five-gallon water jars and lug them back on their heads under the fiery sun.

One momentous day four months back, years, or more likely whole centuries, of stoic patience snapped.

“This time, we got so fed up we decided to do it for ourselves,” Shanti, 25, proudly recalls. The mother of three at first glance has nothing of the revolutionary about her.

Deciding they had to depend on their own efforts, the 32 members of the women’s council of the poor farming village collected two rupees--about six cents--from each member, and had two high school graduates fetch the needed parts and fix the pump.

For Sadachipatti and the surrounding area, that humble but measurable stab at what the theorists of social work call “empowerment” was an earthquake that made men, who run things around here, sit up and take notice.

“If somebody had told me 10 years ago that this would happen, I would have laughed at him,” marveled Krishnaswamy Rajivan, who has a doctorate in economics from USC and is district collector, or chief government official, for the Madurai area.

Across the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, no fewer than 24,000 women’s groups are endeavoring to better the often-brutish lives of more than 26 million women, sometimes with dazzling success. Most busy themselves with traditional women’s duties such as child rearing.

Greater literacy, the radicalizing presence of some Christian denominations and an ambitious state program to feed lunch to every schoolchild has meant that there is more grass-roots women’s activity here than in many states. But across the country, often thanks to government funds or foreign donations, women have banded together to try to solve their problems.

In Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Karnataka, a government-sponsored program called Education for Women’s Equality teaches women their rights, birth control, where to get legal aid and what they are entitled to in terms of land and property when they marry.

“It doesn’t give them total literacy. It’s consciousness-raising,” explained Ritu Menon, co-founder of the New Delhi-based Kali for Women publishing house.

In Sadachipatti and countless other dusty, out-of-the-way places throughout the peninsula, grass-roots mobilization by women after generations of passive acceptance of life’s hardships is often the sole alternative to official aid that probably will not materialize anyway.

“Any government official who comes here is after money,” Yogaraj, a former army NCO with a magnificent handlebar mustache and paunch who is now a rural village chief, says in a verdict that allows no appeal. “They cannot expect any help from the government.”

This is empowerment at its most basic, tackling problems--such as a faulty pump--that relatively few women’s groups in the United States or other Western countries have ever faced. Women here who have sought education or dedicated themselves to improving the lives of their countrywomen may sometimes have sacrificed their chances for marriage and a family.

Then again, there are parallels with other, richer countries.

For example, if American women have had to battle banks and private companies for the right to have their own charge and bank accounts, in rural Tamil Nadu they have had to circumvent usurious moneylenders.

To break the usurers’ power, and to secure access to credit and the clout it carries, Sadachipatti’s women created their own savings bank, and socked away 8,000 rupees, or about $260--a fortune here. They lend money to members of the women’s union at 3%, instead of the moneylenders’ 10%. And this is no isolated example.

Throughout the Usilampatti subdistrict 25 miles west of Madurai, women’s savings cooperatives now boast more than $55,000 in combined assets. At meetings, the women decide whom to lend money for the purchase of milch animals, a shop or farmland. The co-ops’ default rate is an impressively low 2%.

“Their board minutes would put Westinghouse or AT&T; to shame,” an admiring Rajivan says.

These are all beacons of encouraging change in what, for India’s poor rural women, is an otherwise bleak landscape. Last month, 600 delegates from throughout the nation convened in New Delhi to hold the All India Women’s Conference, an event sponsored by the country’s extreme left. They reeled off a gruesome, state-by-state litany of problems: rape, molestation, sexual harassment, wife-beating, discrimination, murder of wives because their husbands were not content with the dowries they brought.

One recent and alarming trend, delegates reported, is the parading of village women naked through the streets to shame them, as happened to an impoverished woman in January in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Her offense: Her son had slapped a boy from a higher caste for stealing some peas.

For many, the conference was a sober time for taking stock.

Many Indian women’s activists and feminists say the seminal moment for them came when the United Nations announced its “Decade for Women” in 1975. Since then, Indian women have amassed enough influence and stirred sufficient debate so that a national Commission for Women was set up two years ago. There is some talk about reserving 33% of positions in political parties for women.

But activists such as Menon say it is not enough to change laws or claim a share of cushy jobs. India’s constitution already guarantees women equality before the law. What’s also needed is to change women’s lives.

The campus of Delhi University--where the leftist-sponsored conference took place with its ardent rhetoric about the “fascist forces” of sexism--is a long, long way from Sadachipatti, population 870. There, goatherds coax their flocks down dusty, unpaved roads, and the rare spectacle of an arriving automobile brings barefoot children on the run.

A few weeks ago, members of the women’s council assembled eagerly to talk about their famous deed. As they sat on the earthen floor of a dimly lit, single-story whitewashed bungalow made of sunbaked mud, whose threshold was chalked with arabesques to ward off evil, a visitor asked them why only they, and not the village menfolk too, had raised a fuss about the pump. After all, don’t men drink water too?

That question, the product of a logic so alien to the sexual division of labor that has prevailed here for centuries, seemed to startle the women. It was like asking why the village men do not give birth.

“You see, water is essential for a woman to run her house,” explained a middle-aged woman who wore a jewel-encrusted stud in each nostril. “To cook food, to clean, a woman needs water. A man doesn’t need water for his work. He works in the fields.”

In Sadachipatti, women’s work includes scrounging for firewood and bringing great bundles home on their heads to cook with.

Women troop out to the nearest paved road, the hardest and flattest place around, to thresh rice and millet against the pavement.

In fact, most of the rural women’s groups created by government impetus in Tamil Nadu deal with matters that have traditionally been the affairs of women: family nutrition and the rearing of children.

But others take a wider view. Such is the hidebound conservatism of the Indian village that if it was not for those outside forces, Sadachipatti’s public pump with the long metal handle still might be out of order. The women’s forum here was founded only because of the Madurai-based Meyer Trust, which engages in humanitarian and rural development work across Tamil Nadu.

Named for a German textile magnate and philanthropist who was an admirer of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the independent but government-funded Meyer Trust sent two supervisors here a year and a half ago. They were looking for an educated woman to serve as “animator” for a woman’s group and found Meena Surileenadam, 24, who has a college degree in economics. She canvassed her fellow villagers, and the forum was born.

“I’m really happy that they are able to achieve things they once depended on others for,” Surileenadam said. “I’m just sorry they didn’t do this before.”

In the roadside town of Chellampatti, another non-government agency financed by the proceeds from one generous woman’s five-acre farm plot tries to teach village girls and women about their rights and to widen their job possibilities.

“Women are also human beings. They are doing the same thing as men in the fields. Why should they suffer?” asked Nallamayan Logamani, the gentle-mannered founder of the Women’s Emancipation and Development Trust and the daughter of its benefactor.

One afternoon, as cows munched hay outside its single-story headquarters, a small class of teen-age girls inside learned how to use treadle-powered sewing machines. The trust has given sewing machines to village families to help them earn a livelihood, and it stood as guarantor so that families could get loans to buy cows or goats.

By the unwritten rules of Indian society, Logamani, 32--who has a master’s degree in political science and a bachelor’s in education, and can type in English and Tamil--should have tried to get as far away from here as possible, to glamorous Bombay or Madras. Yet the Tamil woman returned to her native land.

“When I heard people were coming from far away to help us, I wondered, why not we ourselves?” she explained.

The development trust tries to combat the rape of female fieldworkers by landowners, a widespread practice that Logamani said is her greatest concern.

The organization sends its three paid counselors into villages to sound out women on their problems, teach them their legal rights and dispense advice. (“Have no more than two or three children” is high on the list). It also organizes groups of 30 or so village women into local chapters.

For a woman with no one else to turn to, the trust can be a godsend.

In the hamlet of Karugapilai, for instance, a husband who suspected his wife of adultery kicked her out of the house. The trust forum called on the man and told him: “Your wife is innocent. Take her back, or we will force you to.” Confronted by so many determined women, the husband gave in.

“If a score of you are vouching for my wife’s character,” he said, “she must be blameless.”

Logamani, a onetime elementary school teacher with fine features and a long, black braid, sometimes looks weary and sad; she is a reminder that the 1980s Western feminist ideal of “having it all” doesn’t translate yet into rural Tamil dialect.

She is past the age when women of her Hindu sub-caste, the Kallars, usually marry.

“I am nowadays so involved that I don’t even think about marriage,” she asserted.

Yet in conversation, she admitted that the ironclad social traditions she is trying to demolish for the good of other women may have left her little choice in her own life.

In Tamil society, a woman with a master’s degree is marriageable only to a man with an equivalent or higher education. And because he is considered a prize catch, his family would demand a high dowry. Her parents, Logamani said, might not have been able to afford the rate.

Logamani gets no pay for the work she does. Funds, though, now seem to be running short.

When the women’s activist went to officials of the Tamil Nadu state government to solicit help, they demanded a bribe, another aid worker disclosed. The future of the Women’s Emancipation and Development Trust appears shaky.

Logamani mentioned nothing of this to a journalist who visited her modest office. In the room outside, the sewing machines hummed as girls learned the tricks of the tailoring trade. Her guest, who was about to leave, asked if she didn’t think that India is an unhappy place to be born a woman. Her answer, full of optimism, burst out of her.

“It’s up to a particular individual,” Logamani said confidently. “All women don’t have to feel that way.”