Women's Empowerment

Thrift Groups

Beginning with 10 paise a day, women were encouraged to form thrift groups and begin income generating activities to work their way out of poverty. Thrift and simple activities to earn that little extra were a boon to women who then began learning to function as a group through the formation of Mahila Mandals. Earlier efforts at cooperative action has fallen by the wayside as these involved men. Men in villages, BCT, found, quite often lacked concern for their families and lacked motivation to make concerted efforts, often frittering away their limited resources. Men were clearly unreliable as tools of change. Observes Dr. Parameswara Rao. “We have come to realize that when we work through men the benefits rarely permeate to the family. A man’s world is mostly limited to himself and perhaps to his farm or work. But a woman’s world extends to her family, that is herself, her husband and her children. Through them, the village also develops.”

Thrift by the Mahila Mandals prepared to free scores of families from the clutches of moneylenders. Barely literate women were trained to keep records and handle money. They learnt to take responsibility and proper utilization and recovery of loans. In time, the Mahila Mandal has become the basic unit around which women are organized. Through it social, economic and spiritual activities strive to improve the community’s quality of life.

The Current Role of Thrift Groups

Thrift continues to be a central activity, the goal being enhancement of productivity and income. In 1993, BCT organized women into small groups called ‘Self Help Groups (SHG) with the result that thrift mobilization increased. To help the women conduct their own affairs, BCT runs a continuing series of workshops where training in book keeping and accountancy is given. To encourage and foster economic self reliance, BCT has begun a programme of gradually withdrawing from direct participation in the villages, continuing through training for the SHG’s and attempting to link SHG’s to banks directly. BCT’s coordinator has several pertinent points to make in this connection:

1. Rural SHG’s are yet to appreciate that the banking system is there to help them. For a poor villager, the ‘bank’ is another form of ‘government’. Nothing cocrete has been done so far to allay this fear and distrust.
2. Commercial profitability of banks and social objective do not go together. Commercial and Grammena banks working in rural areas like ours are prone to worry more about profits than social objectives.
3. Loan agreement, cheque books, pay slips, FDR’s etc. in banks in our villages are still all in English! Surely to introduce forms in the local language is not big task.
4. Informal SHG’s are generally viewed with suspicion by banks which try to fit them within the existing provisions of the law. This is a problem which any SHG faces in the initial stages till it assumes a formal character. Dr. C. Rangarajan, Govenor, Reserve bank of India observes “to avoid the problem regarding the legal status of the SHGs, banks are providing credit directly to individuals based on the recommondation of the SHG’s”. This must be made universally applicable.

(Excerpt from Smt. Asha Nori’s article “Bhagavatula Charitable Trust in Retrospect” in BCT's 2003 Souvenir Book)

Learn More: Thrift Groups, Women and Progress