Rural women bear the brunt of the lockdown

Ranchi/ Hyderabad/Lucknow/Pune/ Bhopal/ Bhubaneshwar: On Wednesday, 62-year-old Vandini Devi walked five kilometres from her village in Bokaro, Jharkhand to the

Ranchi/ Hyderabad/Lucknow/Pune/ Bhopal/ Bhubaneshwar: On Wednesday, 62-year-old Vandini Devi walked five kilometres from her village in Bokaro, Jharkhand to the bank in order to check if money had been credited to her Jan Dhan account. She was disappointed to learn that it hadn’t. A resident of Chargi village, Devi said that she had not received her widow pension since February, either. “We were promised two months’ free food grain, but I was given 5 kilograms of ration for only one month. My younger son, who lives with me, works as a daily wager and he has had no work due to lockdown. I am in big distress,” Devi said.

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In view of the 21-day national lockdown which began on March 25, India’s rural population has been central to most relief measures announced by states. On March 26 itself, the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced that Rs 500 will be credited into Jan Dhan accounts held by women for three months, starting April. There are more than 20.39 crore such accounts. Separately, many states have also allocated funds to keep the Public Distribution System (PDS) flush with supplies so that ration-card holders can receive their dry rations, even as daily wage, manual and agricultural work dries up. At the other end of this are the nearly 4 crore rural women who are the purported recipients of these benefits. Hindustan Times spoke to some of these women across Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Jharkhand has 1.33 crore Jan Dhan accounts; close to 73 lakh women are expected to receive the sum of Rs 500. According to state level bankers’ committee senior manager Bibhaw Kumar, the money has already been credited for April. “A similar amount will be paid for May and June,” he said.

With no money in the bank account, and government assistance awaited, 55-year-old Shahjahan in Lucknow’s Asti village has only 15kg wheat and 10kg rice left for her family of five. On March 30, UP chief minister Adityanath announced relief worth Rs 611 crore to all Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme beneficiaries, following which Shahjahan visited her bank. She said she waited for over an hour as there was a long queue of the people keen to withdraw money.

“A few other women like me did not receive any amount in the account. We asked the bank official but he could not give us a satisfactory answer,” said Shahjahan, who is a daily wage worker registered under MNREGS. Shahjahan is the head of the family in the ration card. She said she had to struggle to get the ration due to long queues. “I could not send my children like many other women as we had to go through the biometric process,” she added. No one followed any social distancing at the ration shop, she said. “We were given 10 kg of wheat and 15 kg rice free of cost,” she said. “The government had also assured us pulses and oil too, but I didn’t receive any.”

In many parts of the country, work under MNREGS has come to a halt. Crop harvesting too has been affected leading to a break in supply chains, as farmers are unable to send their produce to ‘mandis’. In Maharashtra, for instance, the lockdown is being implemented rigorously, with police patrol cars preventing farmers from engaging labour to harvest the produce and farming activities.

Sulekha Naba, a 40-year-old tribal woman in Badipalli village of western Odisha district of Bargarh queued up like other villagers to get the Rs 1000 assistance that chief minister Naveen Patnaik had announced for cardholders under the national food security act. She also queued up to receive the Rs 500 deposited in her Jan Dhan account. Naba, a landless daily labourer, has been without work since the lockdown. While she did receive three months ration — 90 kilos of rice for her family of six, which she lugged back to her home a kilometre away — she worried that the cash assistance would hardly be enough to sustain her family. Odisha has 7.4 million households covered under Jan Dhan yojana scheme — that’s 99.85% of the total number of households in the state.

Long queues of women to withdraw Rs 500 from their Jan Dhan bank accounts have been witnessed in almost all rural areas in Maharashtra. Yogesh Warkhede, a ‘bank friend’ appointed by Bank of Baroda at Nampur village in Nashik district of Maharashtra said almost 200 people have visited his home to enquire about the deposits. The rush in the branches of nationalised banks is almost three to four times more than a normal day in Nampur village (it has a population of 10,000), he said. Satish Bairagi who works for a primary co-operative society at Nampur in Nashik district and distributes food in the PDS ration shop said that crowds were normal.

To an extent, the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu have been able to manage such crowds through an innovative token system: Each family is given a token with a specific date and time to pick up their rations at the Fair Price shops. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh completed the first phase of distribution of rice and other essential commodities, as well as cash assistance in the first week of April itself. Telangana has also authorised local Self Help Groups to help distribute the cash to women. “In Narayanraopet, nobody had to go to the banks. The bank authorities themselves authorised the local self-help group women in the villages to distribute the money to the beneficiaries. Most of the villages have Stree Nidhi (women banks),” said K Yella Reddy, a resident. These banks are operated by the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas. The state has 95.9 lakh Jan Dhan account holders.

In Kerala, ration holders are classified on the basis of their economic vulnerability. The state did away with biometric identification on April 1 to aid the process of distribution. It has now started supplying the ration based on SMSes in order to control the rush. To ease cash distribution, it began to offer tokens to residents, based on whether their account number is odd or even.

Not all states have been able to use technology seamlessly, however. In Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh, Guddi Bai Lodhi, 58, went to the branch of Gramin Bank to collect her Rs 500. “When my turn came after more than an hour the bank clerk said the ‘link’ of the computer was not working. Then I proceeded to another branch of the bank where there were already 50 people waiting for their turn to withdraw the amount.”

She managed to withdraw the amount and purchase a few grocery items.