Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

140 CHHAYA DATAR
acquired land, through struggle or other mechanisms, including purchase,
and have managed these lands independently. Such cases could show
that access to land is a priority for secured livelihood and also point the
direction to bringing about incremental structural change.
The deficiency of micro-credit programmes is that these very rarely
help to create assets for the majority of women who are either landless or
possess small plots. The interest rates are too high, the loan amount is
very small and the duration of repayment is very short for the woman to
be able to create a surplus from that particular enterprise and repay the
loan. Her repayment comes from other sources of income such as the labour
she and her family perform on the other sites. Nevertheless, rarely does
the asset become viable enough to be self-sustaining, that is, to be able to
pay for the labour cost of maintaining the asset. The micro-credit programme
has been successful only when it is properly organised by NGOs
with backward and forward linkages and the mobilisation cost is borne
through some other source of funding.
Through my own experience of interacting on a small scale with Self-
Help Groups (SHGs), I realised that if micro-credit activity were combined
with payment for the labour cost of developing an asset (say, a plot of
land for fodder, horticulture or biofuel cultivation), then the asset would
be sustained. The loan obtained from the SHG could then be utilised as
investment for small equipment, water delivery systems and so on. This
could also have potential for structural changes in the access to land and
land rights. I then looked at Maharashtra’s EGS, which had already addressed
some of these ideas. EGS was meant for landholders and small
farmers, but its provisions could also apply to women’s groups, SHGs or
an individual woman member of an SHG. In my understanding, an SHG
is only a vehicle for bringing women together as their livelihood resources
are shrinking. It cannot be a tool to launch women in the marketplace to
compete with other powerful actors, or to make their living in the competitive
world without any assistance.
This chapter is the outcome of a small study that I undertook in
Osmanabad district of Maharashtra to explore whether the scheme of
horticulture funded through the EGS since 1991 could be utilised in the
manner I had visualised, and whether women SHG members were willing
to undertake the operations under the scheme, becoming entrepreneurs,
that is, horticulturists.