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Election in Pincodes: Bihar swirls in the ripples set off by a central scheme

By, Muzaffarpur
May 15, 2024 08:01 AM IST

HT looks at some key constituencies across the country that encapsulate the issues shaping the ongoing Lok Sabha electoral contest

The canopy of an electric blue cotton saree pulled over her head, Asha Das set out from her village in northwest Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district one searing morning in May last year. She dropped out of school in Class 8, and married at 25, never having dreamt of stepping out of her village of Khabra. In the region, women travelling alone was a source of social consternation, with concerns being raised not just about safety but also family honour.

The region is set back by a crippling lack of infrastructure. (ht photo)
The region is set back by a crippling lack of infrastructure. (ht photo)

Yet, that morning, she cheerfully sprinted up the dusty village road and past the precarious makeshift bridge of bamboo poles arranged on stilts. Her destination was farther – the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA), Mussoorie where India’s young bureaucrats get trained. Alongside her was a compatriot from the small organisation they run together, Mina Devi

“It was a lifetime achievement. Our names were flashed on screen and we addressed the officers for 15 minutes each for three days,” said Das.

During that lecture, the two women told a roomful of budding administrators how they started their organisation to earn a basic livelihood, but soon found that it could motivate other women like them to attain self-dependence and education, and teach them the importance of saving and taking care of their health. “It was like a dream. We had never been to such an environment,” said Devi.

Das runs a small village-based group of women who grow their own mushrooms and then sell them at the local market.Devi is studying at the local polytechnic institute to sharpen her accounting skills, after working as a master bookkeeper at the same organisation. She also visits the homes of the elderly and the sick to help them with their banking needs.

Despite their many achievements, hardly anyone knows them by their names. Instead, their calling card is just “didi” (or sister). For, the two women are the first participants in the central government’s flagship lakhpati didi (millionaire sister) scheme, which aims to catalyse economic empowerment and financial independence among women in rural areas. A lakhpati didi is a self-help group (SHG) member who earns an annual household income of 100,000 or more. This income is calculated for at least four agricultural seasons and/or business cycles, with an average monthly income exceeding 10,000, so that it is sustainable. “It’s now part of our identity,” said Das.

Lakhpati didi is part of a bouquet of schemes that form the central government’s welfare outreach and the core of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s re-election pitch in the ongoing Lok Sabha polls. But by targeting women in the hinterland, the scheme is also stoking a social churn and seeding behavioural and economic change. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Muzaffarpur.

Das’s first tryst with self-help groups (SHGs) began in 2011. That year, members of a state government scheme – the Bihar Livelihoods Project, better known as Jeevika – came to her village. At the time, the thought of women stepping out of the house, unsupervised by their male relatives, was alien to Khabra. Let alone men, even older women in the house were opposed to the idea of allowing married women to work. The Jeevika workers, therefore, first convinced Das’s 58-year-old mother-in-law to join the scheme. Two months later, Das followed.

“We first went into the savings scheme of the SHG and saved 10 per week. This continued till 2015; from 2015 till 2022, my savings contribution increased to 20 per week. Now, it is 50 per week,” she said.

When she was chosen as a lakhpati didi in 2023, it unlocked new opportunities for her. The scheme was on the lookout for SHG members associated with small producer groups engaged in localised marketing catering to local demand and supply situations. Their business model is primarily based on economies of aggregation and thus aimed at reduction in individual transaction costs. Their target markets are also local and usually fall within a short radius.

“I got selected as I completed two years in SHG and availed of the community investment fund (CIF). I had already initiated my project of oyster mushrooms and was actively involved in the savings scheme for more than a decade,” said Das, who has two sons and a daughter.

The daughter got married in 2022. The eldest son works in the plywood industry and the youngest is an ITI passout. Her husband, Ajit Das, is a construction worker. With her savings, they have now built a proper house.

“Our group got a loan of 50,000 through which five didis started a business. We joined gram sangathan through which we got health benefits,” said Das.

Today, she runs the Sangam Gravity Samiti Mushroom Cluster in Khabra, spread over 7,400 sq feet of land taken on lease of 50,000 per annum. It is a cluster run by 10 women, each producing 29 kg oyster mushroom per day in a 720 sq feet hut. “We have been able to supply mushrooms worth 6.25 lakh in six months,” Das said.

Devi, too, has turned her life around – from not being sure where her next meal would come from to building a two-storey house and sending her son to Sainik School. “I travel by my own scooty. The SHG has changed the lives of many,” she said.

The Lakhpati Didi scheme stands on two prongs – capacity building training for the women selected, and providing them with easy loans backed by the government to expand their businesses. There is a revolving fund of 20,000 to 30,000 per eligible SHG, and a 2.5 lakh community investment fund, in addition to collateral-free bank loans up to 20 lakh, an interest subsidy , and an overdraft facility for SHG members with Jan Dhan accounts. In addition, credit guarantees for loans up to 5 lakh for a maximum of 5 years are also provided.

For Muzaffarpur, this is a revolution. Many of the women in the scheme come from the hinterland and marginalised castes, where banking penetration is historically low, forcing locals to fall prey to interest-gouging moneylenders.

“The immediate impact of the scheme was on our lives. We stopped going to the mahajans (money lenders) for our small needs. One didi, on an average, saved 12,000 per year,” said Das.

The number of women in the sangam cluster today stands at 8,444. “More and more women, cutting across caste and community including minority women are stepping towards self dependence,” said Anisha Ganguly, district project manager, Muzaffarpur.

The state has around 1.1 million SHGs that employ roughly 12.7 million women. The Lakhpati didi portal says about 3.2 million didis have been identified. Muzaffarpur has nearly 600,000 women associated with 50,159 SHGs, which are working to make bags and bangles, grow vegetables, make pickles, build mosquito nets and run a kitchen service. “Today the district boasts of nearly 360,000 lakhpati didis, some of whom are earning 7 lakh and above a year,” said Ganguly.

This is engendering deeper political economy changes. During the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the women voter turnout in Muzaffarpur was 64.56% against 57.7% of the men – this difference of roughly seven percentage points was among the highest in the state. Experts point to the expansion of SHGs and the financial empowerment of schemes such as Lakhpati Didi as catalysts helping women carve out independent public spaces.

“The financial empowerment definitely made their identity stronger,” said Kanchan Bala,an expert on women’s movements.

Devi is the biggest example of this phenomenon. Once a meek wife of a construction worker who seldom stepped out of the home, she contested the panchayat elections in 2021, and lost by just four votes. She is also now one of the loudest voices in support of Bihar’s controversial prohibition drive, one that chief minister Nitish Kumar brought in 2016 after many women’s groups held protests.

“Today nobody can dictate to us. We have enough reasoning to decide good and bad, and identify who stands for us and who just talk. We are self-dependent,” she said.

During one of her drives against prohibition in 2020, a man involved in liquor trade attacked her with a sword. But she remained undaunted. “We decide silently and the decision doesn’t change.”

Bhatgama, a sleepy village of roughly 2,000 people on the northeastern fringes of Muzaffarpur, jumped into the national headlines last year after 11 people, including eight children, drowned when their boat capsized in the Bagmati river. The tragedy underlined the crippling lack of infrastructure in the region, including a 30-year-demand for a bridge.

Eight months on, the concerns have melted away. One summer afternoon, a group of villagers are engrossed in political gossip under a tree, the pages of a Hindi broadsheet splayed in front of them.

Women voters pose after casting their ballot in Ujiarpur, Bihar,(HT Photo)
Women voters pose after casting their ballot in Ujiarpur, Bihar,(HT Photo)

“Nobody talks about the issues. Everybody is counting the caste numbers. Where will the Bhumihars go, who will the Sahni’s vote etc. We face floods every year. At least 10 villages still use makeshift bridges made of bamboo,” said Govinder Sahani, who lost his brother in the boat mishap. “At many places, the bridge demand is three decades old but at the time of polls it is forgotten.”

In this mix of extremely backward classes, Muslims, Yadavs and Bhumihars, women such as Devi and Das are a relatively new addition. It’ll be an exaggeration to say that women vote as a distinct bloc because most of them have lingering allegiances to the caste and faith groups of their birth, but their adherence to the direction given by the patriarch has loosened. “Our decision making and voting behaviour are no longer influenced by anybody,” said another woman, Rita Devi.

The National Democratic Alliance is hoping that like 2019 – when Ujwala and other welfare schemes helped the BJP gain among women – this election will see the Lakhpati Didi become a game changer. This is why, the party points out, the scheme was mentioned prominently in the interim budget, which increased the target of lakhpati didis from 20 million to 30 million. “We have reformed women’s life particularly in rural Bihar by creating self-reliant women folk not only economically but socially. Now, Modi ji has said that we will make crores of women Lakhpati didis…We are asking for votes only after reforming millions of lives,” said BJP state vice-president Santosh Pathak.

The party has denied ticket to its two-time sitting MP Ajay Nishad – who won 2019 with more than 400,000 votes – and has picked Raj Bhushan Choudhary, who lost five years ago to Nishad as a candidate of the Vikassheel Insaan Party.

The BJP sitting MP is now the Congress candidate. The Opposition has an uphill climb on a seat once represented by George Fernandes five times but which was last won by the Rashtriya Janata Dal in 1998. “Nitish Kumar is banking on women votes but I don’t think they will vote for NDA this time. Instead, we will benefit as the Congress manifesto speaks a lot about their welfare,” said Anand Madhab, the Congress spokesperson.

As elections approach – Muzaffarpur votes on May 20 – the political temperature in Khabra is rising. But Das has no time to think of the polls. The 40-year-old gave her Class 10 examinations this year through open schooling and the results are expected any day. “My sons encourage me to study. It is giving me more understanding about the people and welfare measures,”she said. “And it’ll help me earn more.”

This is the 24th in a series of election reports from the field that look at national and local issues through an electoral lens.

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