I met a couple of NGOs today. It’s fascinating how the system works. There are innumerable such people who start these NGOs. Say, one is named - Jagrut Mahila Samiti. They can be working for infinite number of causes - nutrition during pregnancy, fight against domestic abuse, education etc. They sometimes also set up ‘Self Help Groups’ - SHGs or ‘Swaym Seva Samoohs’ as they are called in Hindi. They are the intermediaries between women who want to get involved in some enterprise and the banks that lend them money. They get targets from the government authorities and get paid a sum as per performance.
An SHG is a collection of 10-20 women. They get an account in one of the nationalized or Grameen banks. These Grameen banks have their offices in shabby little rickety buildings, but they do amazing work. They are usually affiliated to some nationalized bank.
When a group is set up, the women all pool in a fixed amount of money every month. The bank also loans them some amount of money after a period of time, if it sees that the women have been depositing money regularly and their bank balance is healthy. After a while, it loans them a bigger sum of money and waives-off one-third of it.
The women also charge each other an interest internally in case one of them wants to borrow money for something urgent from their joint deposit.
The problem is not the lack of governmental initiative. That is firing on all cylinders as I see it. There are two other major problems. One, when the money is loaned out, there are enough people in the system to demand a commission. Around 20% of the hand-out gets dissipated through that channel. The second problem is that the women don’t use the money for business i.e. they don’t invest in ventures that will give them a steady income for years to come. They use the money for short-term gains, at most, buffaloes.
On a lighter note, this NGO woman I met today had set up a Mahila Forum in some village in UP which would go and beat up the men who perpetrated domestic abuse on their women. Apparently they became extremely powerful in the village; the men would quake in their boots at the thought of them.
By the way, Happy New Year to all who are reading this. May you find all your answers.
4 comments:
Hope you have a great 2009 as well. I'm actually looking for questions not answers. :-)
Cryptic end to a rather straight forward post.
Hehe, you should have named this post jhaadu power.
Interesting post. :)
Sorry for just dropping in but I like searching for and reading random blogs :)
Anyway, I strongly agree that even with the presence of such organizations and work groups, people (women as specific to this post) should hunt for bigger and better opportunities rather than a short term gain. As in obviously those bigger opportunities must be able to fulfill present needs also but they should have a mentality of approaching new heights. Obviously with the careful analysis of risk that might come into picture.
Again, very nice post :)
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