Living the IIT dream, thanks to micro-finance

From a child labourer to an IITian, it has has been a long and arduous journey for Samuel. He would have ended up like many other child labourers in Andhra Pradesh had his mother Iyamma not taken a loan from a village SHG about a decade ago, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Feb 14, 2007, 23:44:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, Kurnool

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

From a child labourer to an IITian, it has has been a long and arduous journey for Samuel. He would have ended up like many other child labourers in Andhra Pradesh had his mother Iyamma not taken a loan from a village Self Help Group (SHG) about a decade ago.

Now in the third year of his engineering course, that small loan has transformed Samuel’s family’s fortunes. They now have farmland and their own house in their native village Lodhipillai, says Vijaya Bharati, director, SMELC.

In 1991, the Self Mobilization Experimentation and Learning Centre (SMELC), the organisation that runs about 5,000 SHGs, was started as a small pilot project funded by the World Bank and assisted by the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP). Since then, the organisation has helped over 2,000 families overcome poverty.

Sabira Begum is another beneficiary. Losing her husband at the tender age of 16 left the illiterate teenage mother of two — a girl and a 40-day old boy — with little hope. “I was being tossed between my in-laws and parents for survival,” she recalls. But her life changed when she met Vijaya Bharati in her village. “Bharati Amma took me in her arms and told me to be courageous. I joined a village SHG and became self-reliant,” she says, adding that since then, she has done her bit by educated womenfolk in Bihar to adopt the concept.

And there has been no looking back for Sabira. She earns Rs 6,000 a month, owns three houses and a shop, and her two children are in college. Being part of the network of SHG has also given her the confidence to head the village SHG.

The village SHGs (5,000 are part of SMILEC) run a unique micro-finance programme for womenfolk. To be part of an SHG, a woman has to deposit Re 1 every day. When the need arises, a member can withdraw her deposit and also take a loan at a very low interest rate, Bharati says. The SHGs also run the mid-day meal scheme in villages.

The SHGs joining hand to form SMELC has resulted in the organisation having a corpus fund of Rs 15 crore, helping it run computer education programmes, school education centres and nursing courses for child labourers. “Of the 1,050 girl child labourers in our education centres, 975 have got admission in government-run residential schools in a year in Kurnool district alone,” Bharati says. The first batch of 32 child labourers turning into qualified nurses will be deployed in health centres soon.

Bharati terms the organisation a successful ‘social lab’, where the life of every woman has changed. She quit her UNDP job in the late 1990s to continue with SMELC with the aim that there is “light in everybody’s life”.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

Follow India news real-time updates and the latest news covered on Hindustan Times, featuring today's critical updates on Sonam Wangchuk LIVE and more across India.