SHGs: Kalahandi's power puff women

As the sun set on 2006, Orissa's Kalahandi district, known for hunger deaths, turned from a metaphor for starvation to a model for seeking solutions through community participation.

Amid interventions ranging from feeding babies to emergency feeding of the aged, the district has seen village and women power transform lives with the help of 700-odd women self-help groups under Mission Shakti.

The government last year handed over the entire public distribution system in the district to self-help groups. In return, it plans to target these women as part of its adult literacy and computer literacy campaigns.

By 2008, the district's 50 child labour project schools will produce 172 women computer munshis for 86 self-help groups. "We are setting up a computer lab and a residential school at a cost of Rs 25 lakh for covering all self-help groups," says District Collector NBS Rajput.

While the spoon-feeding drive, with the involvement of mothers, has seen the number of underweight children fall by 10 per cent, it is the handing over of the public distribution system to the SHGs that is sending ounces of energy into the villages, otherwise cut off from all trappings of development, be it a pucca house, electricity, or a transport link with the urban centres.

In Lanjigarh block office, a group of women wearing bright uniform polyester saris march to the office of the BDO and return to their village with bags of rice. They are members of a self-help group from a neighbouring village and have taken over the job of collection and supply of rice and kerosene to ration-card holders.

Majority of the PDS dealers in the district have been sent home for good. "This has been done all over the state in a partial manner, but in Kalahandi, we are planning to hand over the entire system to these women by February," says Rajput.

In Balichoda village in Kaliyakundal gram panchayat in Junagarh block, the PDS group is as active as the mothers' group. The latter cook and serve mid-day meals in all village schools.

Jamuna Khura and Kamadeini Nayak of Banadevi Mahila Mandal, a PDS group in Balichoda village show their storage facility, which is also their home. "We bring rice and kerosene in tractors," says Jamuna. "The kerosene can has been leased out to the PDS group in the neighbouring village," she adds.

Banadevi mandal's main activity is buying "fancy" from Raipur in neighbouring Chhattisgarh and sell it in nearby villages. The returns are meagre, but for a group of landless villagers who depend on migration and wage labour, they brings hope. Another SHG in the village which deals in fish has got the pond on lease from the district authorities. All the ponds in the district have been leased out to SHGs," the collector says.

Mission Shakti has seen 755 women groups in the district getting empowered. The groups, leading a movement for total sanitation, are being trained to install toilets. "A beginning is being made with the houses of SHG members," says Ashok Patnaik of the NGO, Kartavya, which is linked with many SHGs.

Rajput, who has taken Mission Shakti as his priority says, "Amid all short-term relief measures in the district, these women-led SHGs will in the long run take the district out of the blue."