Women close resource gap

The functions were organised by the National Savings Institute (NSI) which coordinates with the respective state governments' small savings departments to encourage people, particularly women, to save a bit for the rainy day and in the process contribute to the development effort in their home states.

In Bangalore, a small group of women who were acting as small savings agents under a scheme run by the NSI, have earned incentives and commissions that salesmen in General Electric or Citibank would be proud of.

Mir Azmat Ali, NSI's regional director announced that for fiscal 2004-05, some 22,000 agents of the Mahila Pradhan Kshetriya Bachat Yojana (MPKBY) had collected Rs 500 crore and earned commissions of Rs 20 crore. Individually, some of the quiet, sari clad housewives receive cheques of up to Rs 35,000 in incentives.

The scheme, Ali said, was started in 1972 by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. She had wanted, he said, to inculcate the habit of thrift in households and among the self-employed and to get women to play an active role in household budgeting.

The women who took up the agencies to garner savings from their friends and neighbours also canvassed various schemes such as the Kisan Vikas Patra and national savings certificates.

Under these schemes, said Ali, who also oversees NSI's work in Andhra Pradesh, more money had been collected in Karnataka by February 2005 than the target set for the full fiscal 2004-05.

Some Rs 7,000 crore had been collected, which after allowing for repaying certificates that had matured, yielded Rs 4,000 crore. In the process, the state had collected some Rs 130 crore more than the target, he said.

Motamma, the high profile former Karnataka women and child development minister known for her work among poor women, admitted she hadn't known that the women in her own state had set in motion such a "quiet revolution."

There were over 15 lakh women who were part of the "sthree shakti" scheme that the state had initiated, she said. From a much poorer background and mostly from the villages, they had raised, in comparison to the MPKBY agents, a modest sum of Rs 2.75 crore. "Why not get them involved in the Mahila Pradhan scheme as well," she said.

More ideas are on the way. For instance, general insurance company HDFC Chubb has tied up with the state to offer poor households a host of health benefits, including money for hospitalisation and medicines, for an annual premium of about Rs 500, Kamalamma, a bureaucrat from the state's department of women and child welfare said.

As for NSI, it is thinking of conducting a market survey to find out which of its schemes are doing well and which need to be scrapped or reworked. Once this is done, the MPKBY agents will have their work cut out and enjoy the additional benefit of being able to hawk products that are always attractive.