Jahanara combs the tangles in the jute fibre, preparing to twist it into rope.
Credit:Manipadma Jena/IPS
KOLKATA, India, Nov 2, 2010 (IPS) - When Anarahim Laskar, a worker at Sealdah rail station, tripped and fell with while carrying a heavy head load in 2007, he could have easily shattered more than his hipbone.
But thanks to help from government initiative Strengthening Rural Development (SRD), the lives of his wife Jahanara and their nine children were not shattered when the family’s sole breadwinner could not resume work. The SRD project provided the family with a simple contraption costing just 13 U.S. dollars – a bicycle wheel with a hand pedal, locally called ‘charkha’, which twists raw jute fibre into rope.
The wheel is grouted in an open space in front of their house in Sahajadapur village in South 24 Parganas – an underdeveloped district in India’s West Bengal state, some 100 kilometres from Kolkata.
After the household chores have been completed, Jahanara and two of her neighbours twist jute ropes for more than 8 hours each day, which earns them at least 35 dollars each month. Anarahim, too, helps his wife, while two of their sons are now old enough to earn wages from working on a farm, which helps to supplement the family’s income.
Implemented since 2006, the West Bengal government’s SRD initiative is pushing the envelope to reach the poorest, and aims to strengthen the rural economy through fiscal decentralisation – covering 30 village clusters governments known as ‘gram panchayats’, with a total of 989 villages in the poorest 12 out of the state’s 19 districts.
"Only by strengthening grassroots governance, enabling the poor to voice and participate in it, can this challenge of poverty be taken on", says Trilochan Singh, principal secretary of West Bengal’s Panchayat and Rural Development Department.
The SRD promotion of self-reliance is showing results in West Bengal by increasing the mandate of local village-level governments; promoting their financial sustainability; and building their capacity to make independent and collective decisions, maintain records and accounts with complete transparency.
The British government’s Department for International Development (DFID) also contributes 1,300 U.S. dollars annually to each village through a SRD-administered Untied Poverty Fund, catering to the diverse needs of individual villages.
The Village Development Committee, a special community group with members across genders and castes, then decides how to spend these untied funds, mainly to improve the livelihoods of the most marginalised and needy people in the community.
One of five women in the 12-member committee, 42-year-old Asida Gazi, who represents Sahajadapur’s 40 percent Muslim community, says it has given ‘charkas’ to 95 poor women, 25 of whom had not even been identified by the government as living below the poverty line. "Our committee, however, knows they are poor and needy since we live in the same village," she says.
Beside ‘charkas’, women have also been given looms to weave gold-thread borders for garments and machines to cut palm leaves into strips to make floor mats. Raw materials, like the jute fibres, are supplied by the purchaser. For the women, this income dispenses of the need for private loan sharks as well as the middle man, who had combined to stifle the growth of the poor.
Other women have also formed self-help groups to escape their poverty, as is the case in Chhatna block of Bankura district, where 19 tribal women from the poorest families started the Uttarpara Namopara Women’s Development Group, named after their village, to embark on an ambitious livelihood initiative – an integrated farm.
Without prior experience and skills, the group relied on their only resource – hard work – and help from their ‘gram panchayat’, Dhaban, to secure leased land and seed money from the United Poverty Fund.
From getting paid daily wage under the National Rural Employment Generation Scheme for digging a pond on their 0.67-hectare plot of land, the women started breeding carp and smaller fish. The pond also provides supplementary irrigation for vegetable crops and fruit plants grown on the rest of the land, which fetch the women a good income.
"Our farm’s progress is not just an enterprise’s success; it symbolises our progress in life, not for us alone, but also others in our poor village," says leader Sharmila Kisku, echoing the group’s newfound confidence.
Now, the all-woman group also rears some 40 goats, supplies ‘green’ manure, and plans to add a chick-cum-egg poultry production unit on their land. A few of the women have even learnt to keep systematic records and accounts of their farm.
Made possible by help from the SRD project and technical training from various government departments, the phenomenal growth of their integrated farm has led to even their husbands and children pitching in to help on a regular basis.
Land owners who dismissed the women’s group initiative are now seeking to replicate their integrated farm model, which requires only a reasonable sum of 4,300 dollars in total to start. Also enticing to investors is the step- payment of capital, and that returns are seen within a year – and multiply over time.
Even though rural poverty in West Bengal more than halved from the 1970s to 2000 owing to farmland reforms, traditional farming in West Bengal gives poor returns.
"Avenues for self-employment need to be worked on. Communities need to be self-sufficient using local resources", says Achin Chakraborty, a professor at Kolkata’s Institute of Development Studies.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53434
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