Spotlight
New Delhi, 12 March 2021
Women Empowerment
SHG MEETING CHALLENGES
By Moin Qazi
The Covid-19 pandemic is a human tragedy of
potentially biblical proportion and has convulsed societies like never before. Whether
the vaccination drive is going to provide some relief in the future will be
ascertained only with time. However, in these challenging times, some sectors
have proved resilient. The sturdiest among these is the self help group
movement in India.
Self-help groups (SHGs) are India’s most
powerful conduit for incubating and empowering women to move from subsistence
to sustainability. The pandemic has amplified their social and economic
resilience and shown how they can effectively articulate a meaningful
grassroots response to such a crisis. These groups have risen to the
extraordinary challenge of the pandemic. They have been meeting the shortfall
in masks, sanitizers and protective equipment, running community kitchens,
fighting misinformation and even providing banking and financial solutions to
far-flung communities.
The NABARD SHG Bank Linkage Programme, which
is the primary conduit that links these SHGs with commercial banks, now covers
124 million rural households. Considering that a rural family is normally a
unit of, say, five members, we can assume that half a billion Indians have been
covered by this programme. These 124 million households hold some Rs 260
billion worth of deposits with the Indian banking system, and have availed
loans worth nearly Rs 1,000 billion. Alongside, over 4 million joint liability
groups (JLGs) received financial assistance to the tune of over Rs 831 billion
from various banks during the previous year.
SHGs are different from the joint liability
groups and are savings oriented groups consisting of 10-20 members from similar
socio-economic background. JLGs consists of 4-10 individuals who band together
to avail a loan from a financial institution and has little role in empowering
members.
As grassroots village-based financial organisations,
often comprised solely of women, SHGs have proven to be vibrant, participative,
business-oriented and community-based institutions that have the potential to
resurrect moribund rural economies. They are playing a crucial role in promoting
a shared agenda around education, health, finance and agriculture and making
affordable loans available where debt lurks in most rural homes. SHGs offer a
safe place to save money, the chance to borrow small amounts on flexible terms
and serve as strong support groups. This mutual aid organisation helps the
members achieve more together than they can alone and becomes self-propagating
over the course of time.
The relationships the women build among
themselves in these collectives and their shared values, and often their common
sense of identity, have helped in changing their self-perception and enhance
their individual confidence. Through membership in these groups, women gain
much through the solidarity they share: They are able to gain a voice in family
decisions, become financially independent and finally break out of poverty. The
sisterhood is so close-knit and persuasive and the sorority is so intense that
women start thinking of themselves in a different way. The organising process
itself is empowering and gives women a voice and brings validity to whatever
they do. Women realise that they are part of the bigger economy and society and
what they do has a lasting influence.
Self help groups have been particularly
empowering for women farmers. Compared to men, women spend more time on the
field, raising nursery, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, sorting, storing,
etc. Yet they find themselves left behind as they don’ hold land in their name,
don’t have any decision making power, and also have very little exposure to the
market. The capacity building support provided
by NGOs for these women is focused on an improved livestock rearing, financial
literacy and exposure visits to successful women managed farms.
The running of an SHG is a great lesson in
governance. It teaches the value of discipline, both financial and procedural,
and broadens the horizons of its members. During their exposure to the groups,
and with the outside world through the group, women become savvier about how to
marshal their forces and are also able to gain a better knowledge of the
system. While the base issues are the same, how we are dealing with them is
different.
SHGs have proven to be an effective
instrument for changing oppressive relationships at home, gender and tradition-related,
and in society. This is especially true for those relationships arising from
caste, class and political power, which have made it difficult for the poor to
build a sustainable base for their livelihood and to grow holistically.
Depending on the family dynamic, it would be hard to know how much a husband
may be influencing or forcing a wife to sign off on something she doesn’t agree
with.
This model generates a unique stock of social
capital through the process of regular group meetings, which is instrumental in
transforming the status of women, both within the home and the community. While
credit support is at the core of the SHG movement, the social impact is much
more than the economic impact.
An increase in self worth is a benefit that
comes with the formal recognition of SHGs. Best practitioners in communities
become community professionals and catalysts for health, literacy, financial
management, agriculture, leadership, livestock and more. Combining groups
through participatory training is making women better equipped to challenge
discriminatory norms and raise public awareness about various gender issues.
A vast majority of female leaders in
Panchayat Raj institutions have come from these collectives and the most
successful sarpanches, have had their grooming in them. Many of these SHGs are
now part of the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) and are prominent
entrepreneurs, bringing prosperity to their communities. They have transitioned
from self-employment to diversify their ventures, mentor thousands of others to
get on the path of entrepreneurship, aggregate into value chains and are proof
that investing in rural women entrepreneurs can be a solid strategy for
transforming villages. They are demonstrating that their concerns are central
to the planning process.
One of the crucial elements in group learning
is the risk-sharing capacity that membership of these groups enables. It
becomes easier to approach female farmers with improved knowledge and practices
on sustainable agriculture practices when they work through groups. Women have
the knowledge and understanding of what is needed to fix the ecological
problems that unsustainable practices have led us to. The knowledge and capability
of women can be leveraged to make agriculture both resilient and sustainable.
Women are galvanising their communities to
harvest rainwater, dig wells, build check dams, de-silt ponds and repair hand
pumps. This has resulted in increased drinking water, better irrigation,
healthier crop harvests and most importantly, fewer treks to fetch water. SHGs have
also set up the grain banks to check hunger among tribal people who are often
trapped in slavery on account of debts they run up for procuring food when they
are out of work.
Policymakers must recognise that women’s
empowerment is not only a right but is closely bound with justice and
development. Empowering women is a long and challenging journey. It starts with
helping them reflect on their situation, inspiring them to realise their rights
and motivating them to share experiences with other women in similar
conditions. Leadership development, training and economic empowerment can
create robust social capital, which is a prerequisite for an equitable world.
---INFA
(Copyright, India
News & Feature Alliance)
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