INSTITUTE FOR RURAL AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT,MANDYA
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Income and basic needs in Mandya. Vikasana and Poverty Alleviation Existing project: Beedi makers. What we want to help Vikasana to do for poor rural women in Mandya |
Vikasana and Poverty Alleviation
The debate on whether SHG (self help group) s can be used as tools to lift the poor out of poverty is ongoing in India. Vikasana thinks it is possible to alleviate poverty provided NGOs facilitate advance planning and resource mobilization. Despite the concept being in existence over the last two decades, there has been no rigorous study which measures the pre and the post scenario of poor women who would be members of a well functioning SHG (Self Help Group). Generally the women who chose to be members of a SHG are from the BPL (Below Poverty Line) families. However, whether they have moved out of poverty or not has not been measured so far. Undoubtedly, SHGs have not allowed all poor women and families to move out of poverty. Most people do not want to be taken out of the BPL list as they would no longer benefit from many of the poverty alleviation programs of the government. However, during interviews for this study, women expressed that they felt distinctly less poor. Many of the NGOs agree that the movement has created a greasing effect in the lives of women. Women and their families will no longer experience the acute hunger and poverty that they had faced earlier. They now have something to fall back on and at times of crisis will not go back to the moneylenders as they did earlier. The fact that some money is available to them from the groups even in the middle of the night in cases of emergency is by itself a boon to the women and should not be underrated. It is important to see how far BPL women were before they joined the SHGs. The take off point is important. If the family was already in business, doing reasonably well—families which are not very poor—the thrift and credit activity would help. The attention of most NGOs has been for the poor, workers who work on daily wages and who pursue petty businesses. However, a few who were above the poverty line sometimes also got included for various reasons, one of them being the spread effect of the concept of SHG. While it is acceptable to start SHGs for all those who want to be in it, it needs to be debated whether the same group should have members from mixed economic category. NGOs such as Vikasana mix the not-so-poor with the poor members deliberately in order that the poor get helped. Usually, the membership of a well functioning SHG has brought in supplementary income for the women and her family -- that is, addition to income but not sufficient to lift the families over the poverty line. Other changes than the creation and support of SHGs are needed to lift poor people out of the subsistence economy.
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