THE UNDESIRABLE OUTCOMES !

I have had the opportunities of visiting several villages and meeting several people on my field visits. Meeting children was very special, though. It was always a great delight to meet with children and interact with them. Their enthusiasm was infectious, their views were forthright. Talking to them invariably provided deep insights on the lives of people in these villages and the difference that development projects were making. It was indeed very encouraging to hear from them how their lives had changed for the better because of these projects – better drinking water and sanitation facilities, better schooling, improved health, more sources of income, higher level of awareness etc. But it was from the children that we also heard of some of the undesirable outcomes of our programmes.

We once visited a village in a district in south India, which received poor rainfall. The project there focussed on supporting agricultural developments. It meant improving farm lands, conserving water, providing credit for seeds and fertilisers and training on improved agricultural practices, all of which would mean more acres of productive land and higher incomes.

One of the children we met was Senthil. He was about 14 and was working on a piece of land owned by his family. He met us with a broad grin. He and his father had been toiling since morning. It was all worth it, he felt. The vegetable crop was good. They had also planted some coconut trees which were growing steadily. Things had certainly looked up over the past 2 years. For the first time ever since he could remember, they were cultivating the land all year round, thanks to an irrigation tank which conserved enough water to meet the needs of the farmers whose farms were located in the vicinity.

“Do you go to school”? I asked Senthil. He looked up to his father, as if seeking permission to reply. “How can he go?”, his father, Murugappan asked. “There is so much work on this farm. If he goes, who will help me? His mother has to look after the home and attend to household chores. She also works in the local anganwadi (a government-run centre for pre-school age children) as a helper to make some extra income.” We looked at Senthil. Probably sensing what our next question would be, he said, “I did go to school. I have completed standard 6 and I was reasonably good in studies. I was interested to continue. But then it is my duty to help my father. So when he asked me to discontinue studying, I did. There was no option”, he said nonchalantly. I could trace a tinge of bitterness, of regret, in his voice. Having gone to school and having been a good student, he was probably aware of the consequences of a choice he had to forego. Well, this is not what we hoped would happen with a project meant to raise incomes!

On another occasion, travelling through a drought prone region in south India, we met up with many people, trying to understand how the drought was affecting the local population. Most people had to depend on casual work as agricultural labourers to survive. Women and men worked side by side wherever they got an opportunity to work. A road construction, a pond renovation, a school building construction, well just about any work was welcome. Evenings were time to relax for the men. They would sit in the school verandah or under the banyan tree or in front of the temple, smoking bidis, exchanging notes for the day. Some extra bucks during the day also meant assembling at the local arrack shop to have a few intoxicating swigs.

For the women though, evenings meant phase two of their working day. Cooking their evening meal, collecting water, washing clothes, milking the cows and feeding them……..their work never seemed to end. But then, they were also involved in something else. Every week, on a specific day, they would meet in groups of 10 or 15 or 20 at the most. They called themselves ‘self-help groups’. Each group had a different name. Each meeting would last for about an hour. Money was collected towards their individual savings which was managed collectively, loans were disbursed and the weekly repayments were transacted.

We attended one such meeting on a warm April evening. As usual, there was a group of curious children who had seated themselves a little away, watching intensely the activities of their mothers. Most of them were girls. The boys were busy playing at a distance. Most of the girls had a younger child on her hips or in her lap or clutching her hand. As the women dispersed and walked towards their homes, we went closer to the girls. On seeing us come towards them, they laughed nervously, moving closer to their mothers. Some of them even ran away. But with Anita (my colleague from Plan) beside us, we managed to hold back a smaller group of girls, most of whom were between 10-14 years of age.

“Do you know what your mothers were doing”? Anita asked. “Yes, they are collecting savings and giving loans”. “Do you know why are doing so”? she asked. “Yes”, one of them said. “So that we won’t be dependent on the local moneylender for money and so that we can meet our needs better”. Good, we thought. Here was the next generation of self-help group members.

We were just about to move on. “But I don’t like what they are doing”, one of girls said. We turned around in surprise. This 14-year old was Nirmala. She said, “It’s all fine that we don’t have to depend on a moneylender or even a bank for loans. But I don’t like it”. On being asked why she didn’t like it, she said, “Our mothers have lot of work to do. They work in the fields or construction sites all day long. When they come home, they have lot of work. Our fathers don’t help us. They while away their time talking or playing cards or drinking country liquor. So invariably, we end up doing a lot of work as our brothers too would not do household work. We need to fetch water, collect fuel wood, take care of our younger siblings, help in cooking……well, help in everything that our mothers do. Now they have even less time. They spend time in meetings, maintaining records, going to the bank, attending trainings or other meetings. This takes them to the block headquarters, 10 kms away. So while we think it is good for the family and the village, I think it is not good for the girls as they face additional burden - which means that some of us had also to drop out of school. I could not continue beyond standard 6. I know of other girls in the village too who have had similar problems. But girls normally don’t speak out as it is anyway considered enough for girls to be educated till standard 5”.

We listened to Nirmala in rapt attention. The other girls too listened carefully and seemed to agree with what she was saying. Nirmala had just explained to us the other side of a micro-credit programme that till then, we were unaware of. Probably their mothers (leave alone their fathers) too were unaware of this. Or even if they were aware, the benefits that this programme brought in as perceived by them probably was more substantial that what they perceived girls’ education could do. Senthil and Nirmala had just made us aware of what we normally tend to overlook beyond the normal ‘project outputs’.