Helping hand

 Hundreds of women self-help groups are transitioning into micro or small social enterprises in an antagonistic market economy, providing a national template with umpteen possibilities.

About two decades ago, V. Malleshwaramma, a woman farmer in her mid-forties with a small farm, would double up as a footloose labourer. Today, she heads an all-women, organic farmers’ company with 250 shareholders in Andhra Pradesh’s Kadapa district, aggregating and processing an array of pesticide-free farm produce — from ragi to paddy to perishables — and sending it to big cities like Hyderabad. What began as a self-help group running on a thrift fund grew in size and transitioned into a robust collective after relentless hard work, training and exposure. The group is part of a growing social enterprise, Sahaja Aharam, which is a federation of 60 collectives and producer companies with nearly 10,000 farmers scattered over Andhra and Telangana.

Cut to Balangir, western Odisha’s once-impoverished and out-migration district: Hundreds of women members of self-help groups are running micro, small and big enterprises as part of the state’s Mission Shakti initiative, a convergence of rural livelihoods missions. A women’s empowerment programme that began in 2001 is now a separate state department with the government outsourcing its services and goods to the women SHGs across Odisha, enrolling nearly 8.5 million women members. In Balangir, the SHGs now provide an array of services and run multiple enterprises — from a running cafeteria to managing a government-run guest house to producing mid-day meals to operating a roaring handloom unit to agro-allied activities, transforming groups that were once mere thrift fund managers into social enterprises.

Women there are also handling the urban waste management — from doorstep garbage collection to production of compost to selling it in the open market. Travel to Kerala, and you’ll be astonished to see the quiet but incredible work that goes on in the Kudumbashree collective, a Kerala initiative for women’s empowerment and poverty alleviation. Women members of Kudumbashree make a steady income from multifaceted activities; they run micro or individual enterprises, or collective businesses with sustainability at their core. In Kerala, women’s neighbourhood groups are building eco-housing and setting up examples in construction.

In Osmanabad, Maharashtra, a 10-year-old self-help group formed by single women has recently graduated into a producers’ company, taking baby steps into a world of cut-throat competition. Vrundavani Patil, the president, lost her husband 10 years ago and set up a group to support single women, from which sprouted this company. She told me that her company can’t be seen as merely an economic enterprise but one that has social responsibilities. It lends support to single women and tries to create economic opportunities that are otherwise hard to come by.

A quiet, if arduous, transformation is happening across India. Hundreds of women SHGs are transitioning into micro or small social enterprises in an antagonistic market economy, providing a national template with umpteen possibilities. The movement is still in its infancy nearly 25 years since SHGs became a serious programmatic imperative. Most of these groups aren’t productive or income-generating. At the last count, about 80 million women are part of SHG networks in India. The problem is that most groups have no access to capital to achieve scale and growth and a level playing field to compete in unfair terrain.

Investing in them should be a national priority; it will yield a bumper socio-economic harvest, as many productive SHGs are demonstrating. India needs a carefully crafted plan for the next three to four decades to make the women SHGs that are part of the national or state rural or urban livelihood missions productive and sustainable. That would usher us into a real double-engine economy.

Jaideep Hardikar

Source: The Telegraph, 11/11/22

India’s policy on cooperation is key to creating livelihoods for all

 A two-day national conference on India’s Cooperation Policy inaugurated by the home and cooperation minister took place earlier this week. The programme was attended by several officials of the Centre and states along with other national institutes and cooperatives. Marked by characteristic incisiveness, the pith of the minister’s address was a call to usher-in a ‘movement for cooperation’. Bureaucrats were quick to draw up the achievements of their respective departments of cooperation—in a manner that showed their preparation for the mandate of the policy. Albeit useful, this missed a major point: that cooperation is not an end in itself. Cooperation is an approach, or, as the draft National Policy on Cooperatives puts it, “a preferred instrument of execution of public policy especially in rural areas". And fundamental to this approach are the attributes that describe our society in general but are amplified in the context of Indian villages. These are the attributes of community ties, collective decision making, mutual trust, shared ownership and social responsibility.

After 74 years of independence and an array of schemes to meet the basic needs of citizens, it is only a matter of logical progression that the state should now focus on creating a society of self-dependent people with adequate livelihood opportunities. And cooperation is being seen as key to this transition. From farming and food-processing to fisheries and self-help groups (SHGs); cooperatives are touted as catalysts for social and economic progress. But what does this renewed focus mean for the effectiveness of a policy? This article picks up elements of cooperation from a scheme aimed at enhancing the livelihood of forest-dependent Tribal communities to answer this question. Rolled out in 2018, the Pradhan Mantri Van Dhan Yojana (PMVDY) leverages the traditional knowledge of Tribal communities to harvest forest produce and strengthen their market linkages. Central to its operations is a Van Dhan Vikas Kendra (VDVK). It is a Tribal-owned centre that undertakes aggregation, processing and packaging of forest produce for sale. The functioning of the scheme hinges on the attributes of cooperative existence.

The first step in cooperation is to bear in mind the affinity among members while setting up VDVKs. With mutual trust and a certain degree of affiliation among members, VDVKs can survive the initial cycles of loss and may continue to exist even after the state pulls out support.

A promising demonstration of this is seen in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, where a group of 200 women have created a market for neem pesticides with their coordinated action. These women lost their first batch of produce to the rains. Starting out slow, they manufactured pesticides and used them in their own farms initially. Promising results prompted much buy-in from others. Today, all the farmer groups in the area buy this organic pesticide from that VDVK.

In yet another VDVK, in Jharkhand, the women said that they were amazed to see the quantum of forest produce that they collectively procured. Earlier, they would sell these products individually and make do with prices fixed by their buyers. As they have started aggregating products now, their negotiating power has also increased. “The traders now come to us to buy mahua flowers, karanj and imli instead of us having to go to them," exclaimed the president of the kendra.

Cooperation also entails convergence. In some VDVKs in Odisha and Chhattisgarh, training for beneficiaries is being conducted in convergence with other schemes like the Entrepreneurship and Skill Development Programme or the Samarth Yojana. As beneficiaries bring home more money, their social standing also improves, reckon women in Kondagaon district of Chhattisgarh. “My husband would not let me participate in the SHG meetings earlier but now drops me off at the kendra every day at 9am," one of them said.

Finally, the autonomy of these cooperatives, which finds mention in the draft policy, is critical to their survival. In the case of VDVKs, the community is free to procure non-timber forest produce for sale. Communities that have control over forests also understand the limitations and requirements of sustainable harvesting. Without community-based forest rights, the sustenance of the scheme would be jeopardized. Recognizing this, Odisha held several meetings of forest officials with community members right at the planning stage, so as to ensure their support later on.

The PMVDY offers a classic example of how the cooperative spirit can be harnessed for social fulfilment and economic growth. This is not to say that cooperatives are not susceptible to failure, inefficiency or corruption. But the multiplier effect created by the success of a few kendras in terms of families empowered and forests preserved would offset the cost of failure of many others. And with enough successful kendras, a cleaner, rule-based and more efficient system would eventually develop. It is yet to be seen how India’s cooperation policy is eventually realized in practice. But schemes such as the PMVDY show that it does offer hope and merits our attention.

Sakshi Abrol is a policy manager at Nation First Policy Research Centre

Source: Mintepaper, 19/04/22