T Vijay Kumar was standing at a lectern and talking about slaying the dragon of poverty. An Andhra Pradesh Cadre IAS officer, he had fought some stiff battles with the mother of all miseries and so people were keen to listen to him. This was at a conference on human development in Delhi last year. And then he made a statement that caught the policy wonks and social activists by surprise. “No government scheme will have a sustainable impact [on the poor in India] until the poor are organised,” he said. Huh?
Yes, Vijay Kumar’s remark doesn’t quite add up unless you appreciate two things: One, while the human knows how to split the atom, it doesn’t know how to make people ‘un-poor’; two, India has been trying to do exactly this for about 60 years, with poor results.
Indira Gandhi provided India with the slogan of Garibi Hatao (Remove Poverty) in the early 1970s. Since then, most big-ticket government schemes on poverty alleviation have either directly given productive assets to the poor, or provided them subsidies. The hope was that the poor would use them to come out of poverty — by themselves. They did not. Nirmala Devi certainly didn’t.
This 45-year-old woman is an ‘untouchable’ or ‘mahadalit’ belonging to the Ravidas community in Shekhwara village of Gaya district in Bihar. She has three children and both she and her husband are illiterate. Her family income was the 3 kg of poor quality rice that her husband would get as a daily wage for his intermittent work on a farm. To meet the family’s various needs, he would have to barter this rice. Sometimes he would work on some nearby construction site and earn Rs. 80 for a day’s work.
All their efforts at saving money and pulling their family out of penury were mostly undone by some illness in the family. Every illness would force them to borrow from the village moneylender who would charge interest, sometimes upwards of 100 percent. They could not pay back and ended up being under the moneylender’s thumb, providing free labour on his farms. The government had allotted Rs. 2 lakh worth of land but Nirmala had to use it as collateral.
According to Vijay Kumar, you cannot attempt to solve the problem of poverty if you straightaway try and solve it for each individual. That step can be taken only after you have organised the poor into small batches and then target the money at these groups. Vijay Kumar should know. He was the man in charge of implementing such a programme in Andhra Pradesh. Later, the Bihar government used this approach and Kumar’s knowledge to try something similar, called Jeevika, in the state. While in Andhra Pradesh this approach has spread to all districts, in Bihar it covers only nine of the 39 districts at present.
Going National
Now the Central government has asked Kumar to take this approach to solving the poverty puzzle to all states. The new programme is called the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM). At the national level, NRLM would represent a whole new approach to fighting rural poverty in India. The encouraging fact is that the model has had good success in the two states out of the four where it has been tried.
Infographic: Sameer Pawar
No one is in a better position to vouch for Kumar’s thesis than Nirmala Devi. Last year, she used the funds from the Jeevika programme to repay her debt and reclaim her land. She then used the funds to start a shop, which eliminated her dependence on agricultural income.
As of now, Jeevika has 370,000 poor households in Bihar within its fold. All the households have been mobilised into 27,317 self-help groups. Each SHG is formed by about 10 to 15 poor women in the village as a mini society that helps its members save small bits of money and use that to tide over tough times by lending among themselves.
R. Radhakrishna, currently the chairman of the National Statistical Commission and head of the committee that formally suggested moving to NRLM, takes the criticism head on. He accepts that NRLM’s framework is a tacit acceptance that the rural self government systems have not really delivered on their promise. He says that experience has shown that in most states these systems are not very democratic institutions and are largely controlled by the vested interests. The alternative to the Andhra Pradesh or Bihar model is the Kerala model, called Kudumbshree, where since the beginning the SHGs and self government systems were connected and democratic.
“The composition of SHGs [in Andhra Pradesh or Bihar] is more egalitarian, with representation of the women and poor. While the PRIs in these states are dominated by the upper castes and the rich,” he says.
Radhakrishna also refutes the charge that there are no independent studies and refers to two studies, one done by himself and the other by the Centre for Economic and Social Studies.
As an alternative, some have suggested that India should adopt the model that China or even many of the European countries have, wherein each village has a bank, which is run by co-operatives. However, Radhakrishna points out that the Chinese and European societies are far more egalitarian than the Indian.
Nevertheless, while the NRLM approach claims women empowerment as one of its key achievements, women rights activists like Subhalakshmi Nandi of Nirantar are “not exactly happy” about this model being scaled up. According to her, in this approach, women are being “overburdened” with responsibility for their surroundings.
In defence of the programme and its impact on women, Kumar points out that Census 2001 showed just three districts in Andhra Pradesh had a positive sex ratio; in the 2011 Census, it is 11 districts.
The Last Mile Challenges
However, even the proponents of this new strategy are aware that scaling it up at the national level will not be easy.
Srijit Mishra, a professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, feels the biggest challenge would be to find enough professionals who would be willing to work at the village level.
Kumar agrees that this is a genuine concern but clarifies that the model focusses on grooming experienced SHG members to train others like them.
“The poor knows how to connect with another poor. The adoption of this model is better primarily because, often enough, the poor are being addressed by someone who they can relate to,” says Kumar.
Radhakrishna says the “institutional architecture” is very important — the political leadership must allow the formation of autonomous societies like Jeevika and SERP.
A big reason why SERP succeeded in Andhra Pradesh and Jeevika in Bihar is that at both places the leadership of the respective societies remained unchanged for almost five years and they were given a free hand. A similar society formed in Orissa has not taken off largely because of the frequent replacement of the official heading the society.
The other big challenge in scaling up stems from the fact that the programme’s focus is on building the capacities of women, who are the most disadvantaged even among the poor.
Experience in both Bihar and Andhra Pradesh has shown that the first few years are tough since there is no easy money being distributed to lure the people to participate.
“It is imperative that the programme is scaled up slowly, giving people the time to realise and understand its benefits,” says Radhakrishna.
“It is for this precise reason that we will attempt to first target only 10 percent of the poorest blocks in the country in the first year,” says Kumar. These would be people like Nirmala Devi. She may never be rich but the society that she lives in now treats her with dignity. “Earlier, people would not even stand next to us. Now they welcome me to their houses,” says Nirmala.
(This story appears in the 20 May, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
POVERTY – A CORPORATE CREATION
on Mar 5, 2013Jeevika is doing remarkable work in bihar, now the state govt has decided to take SHG movement in all the dist of Bihar, where Jeevika will play vital role in the campaign. Most of the dist will be covered by the Jeevika where WDC will be second partner for this movement.
on Dec 17, 2012Poverty has become a vast agenda in politics. I think we the people of India should awake and prepare ourselves for another revolution as French revolution. Our country also has three level system 1st estate, 2nd estate and 3rd estate. Population of 3rd estate is increasing and because of illiteracy, awareness these people are deprived of their rights. Which seems that the days are approaching when the whole nation will engrossed with evil of poverty. SHG and NGO should come up with their views and ideas to help the poor people of the nation and bring the majority into action
on May 23, 2012Organizing the poor has been proved as the best tool so far to bring a real change in their lives. But the biggest problem is organising them and making their activity sustainable. In my district Saiha, Mizoram, which is the remotest in country, we are trying to pool the like minded persons with special focus on women and with necessary training provide them with seed money/support to start an activity. Farmers groups are being made to enable them to procure costly equipment which they can share among themselves with user charges. We have got mixed results with these groupings but nevertheless this is still the best way to fight poverty and improve the productivity and income level of the poor.
on May 3, 2012The solution to help the poor is to give land and invest in agriculture. Donation and government grants to ngos is wasting of money. Let the food come from the earth. The money the ngos are using on themselves can feed three times the amount which they are claiming to help. The government should assign a group to monitor and check on the work of the ngos.
on Apr 26, 2012I will like to contact with Mr.Vijay Kumar. I am living in Canada and want to help with this project to help the poor. I feel that giving them a piece of land with a kitchen garden and conducting a school in each village we will be able to build growing healthy and literate communties instead of poor villages. We must be willing to work together with the Panchayats. We must not create any enemies. We must let the Panchayats be our right hand.Because they have the control.We must help their families first so they will have no need to take advantage of the poor.Then we can succeed.I do not believe in donations.Let the food come from the ground. I am personally willing to help provide some finance to some of these people to come ouit of their debts. Please reply me.
on Apr 21, 2012Dear Vishvani, it is true that we must make panchayats the effective centre for rural transformation. I will put you in touch with Mr Vijay Kumar through a separate mail. Regards.
on Apr 21, 2012Great insights to fighting poverty!!!
on May 23, 2011