Chetna Sinha set up the Mann Deshi Foundation with the aim of economically and socially empowering women in Maharashtra's Mhaswad village. She has never looked back
Mhaswad village is a mere blip on India’s vast geographic radar but it shines brightly on the country’s development landscape. The lodestar in this parched village is a woman of indefatigable stamina and unshakable courage. Chetna Gala Sinha has dedicated her life to empowering some of the area’s most impoverished and dispossessed women by giving them the tools to run businesses of their own. Her work has transformed the lives of nearly half a million women and she hopes to help one million women by 2024. Mhaswad village, which has become a crucible for some of the most revolutionary social experiments, nestles in Satara district, on the placid banks of Manganga River, some 300 km south-east of Mumbai.
Rural areas typically face several developmental impediments: Small land holdings; low savings and capital formation; stagnant factor productivity; limited market access; low levels of human development; paucity of resources and a young population alienated from farming and other rural occupations. Reliant for the most part on subsistence agriculture, villagers are packing up in droves and heading to cities. They need solutions tailored to their needs and problems. Short-term palliatives like loan waivers and cash transfers cannot cure or address the pathology of poverty or fix the deep fault lines in the rural economy. Sinha’s work with marginalised communities is now a legend. Described variously as a social entrepreneur, a microfinance banker, an economist, a farmer and an activist, Sinha has set a path that continues to remain relevant and resonant. She has nurtured social entrepreneurship at the grassroots that is redefining the way the world thinks about rural distress. Sinha has been able to build women’s perspectives in the context of development, enabling them to claim space in the political, economic, societal and cultural systems. Women are reframing crucial questions on burning issues, about their experiences, problems, needs and are developing a different narrative.
Sinha grew up in Mumbai where she obtained a postgraduate degree in economics. She then moved to Bihar to work with landless labourers. She came in contact with the youth movement led by Jaiprakash Narayan and was inspired by his socialist philosophy. She met her husband Vijay Sinha, a farmer from Mhaswad, during a farmers’ movement in Maharashtra between 1984 and 1985. She moved from Mumbai to Mhaswad after marriage.
Transplanted to a totally alien culture, Sinha initially found it difficult to strike roots. She spent time helping her husband on the farm and organising the local community on different issues. The world of inequities that surrounded her kept her restless and she soon found her bearings. With the ebullient spirit that was honed in JPs movement, she set her sights on toppling the status quo in her husband’s county. She followed through to tackle inequities and eradicate dysfunction in the local society. “I found life completely different from Mumbai. It opened my eyes to the plight of people at the grassroots level and the challenge of working for their benefit came with the idealism I had grown up with,” recalls Sinha.
In 1996, Sinha founded the Mann Deshi Foundation with the aim of economically and socially empowering rural women. One of Sinha’s first actions was to set up a bank for village women. She believes access to finance is an important piece in the development ecosystem and has necessarily to be at the core of any economic strategy. “Financial services are like safe water and clean energy — they are essential to leading a better life”, says Sinha. Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank is India’s first bank that runs for and is managed by rural women. It began with 840 women members, each contributing a share capital of Rs 600. Today, it has nine branches, more than 28,000 members and a share capital of Rs 69 crore. It has enabled thousands of women to save, insure and to responsibly borrow —allowing them to build their assets and improve their well-being and financial prospects. The bank offers specially-designed savings accounts, pension services and insurance products as well as individualised loans. Financing is perhaps the biggest problem faced by small businesses in the developing world. People need credit to increase their financial prospects. “The greatest fracture facing India is women’s inequality”, reiterates Sinha. “The majority of women are doing business on roads in cities and villages, selling things in haats but they do not have access to funds. Regular banks aren’t typically an option; they have several formalities, fee and documentation that can be intimidating and require an arduous trek to the nearest town, which can compromise a day’s wages. Banks find this segment unviable because they feel the costs of underwriting and originating these small loans are substantial,” she says.
Mann Deshi serves as an umbrella platform for several community initiatives like cattle camps; mobile para-veterinary services; erection of check dams; running a farmer produce company; local radio stations and sports talent hunts. Some of the more modern innovations include a business school and the Mann Deshi Chamber of Commerce for Rural Women (MCCRW) in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI)
Mann Deshi Business School for Rural Women (MDBSRW) is a unique nursery for unlettered women. It places “professional” expertise in the hands of the weakest of the weak and the poorest of the poor: Village women. Set up in 2006, MDBSRW offers a menu of 25 courses, largely developed in-house. These include classes in finance and marketing management and vocational skills such as screen-printing, chutney-making, bag-making, tailoring and catering among others. The courses are certified by the National Skill Development Corporation of India (NSDC). This ingenuity was recognised alongside Harvard Business School and Fuqua School of Business in a Financial Times’ ranking of the best B-schools.
A unique idea is the Business School on Wheels.The state-of-the-art bus travels with computers and micro ATMs. MDBSRW also offers a Deshi MBA, which is a year-long course where women attend workshops on finance, planning, inventory, marketing and accounting. The course syllabus was developed by Mumbai’s SP Jain Management Institute and acclaimed non-profit Accion. When the programme was set up in 2015 just 286 women participated. This year, 958 women graduated. A Deshi MBA student is also provided with a mentor. With chapters of the business school in 12 centres equipped with nine buses, MDBSRW has unleashed an entrepreneurial wave in villages across Maharashtra, Gujarat and Karnataka.
Mann Desha has helped over 4,00,000 women set up businesses and access new markets. Traditionally confined to the home, these village women have now become productive, articulate and confident in their ability to think for themselves. Sinha argues that rural women should be acknowledged for who they really are — a new generation of dynamic entrepreneurs, job-creators and economy drivers, committed to bringing a change in their communities.
Women have also been trained as “barefoot professionals”. Four years ago, Mann Deshi started a unique initiative to train women in goat farming, vaccinations, first aid and artificial insemination. They are popularly known as “goat doctors.” Today the team has 19 para-veterinarians.
The biggest contribution to the local economy are the cattle camps. This year, the cattle camp was set up in January in collaboration with the Bajaj Foundation and two other organisations. It provides fodder, water and shelter needed to sustain cattle from surrounding villages when periodical and recurrent drought stares at them. Spread over 100 acres, it sheltered 7,000 cows and 20,000 goats belonging to more than 50 villages. Along with the cattle shed, smaller tents — made out of cloth, straw, leaves and plastic sheeting — are built for families accompanying the scrawny cattle. People work through the day, chopping sugarcane and preparing wet fodder for the cattle.
Sinha has been awarded the Nari Shakti Puraskar, India’s highest civilian award for women who work in the area of women’s empowerment, Schwab Foundation’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award (2013), Forbes Social Entrepreneurs of the Year Award (2017). She has served as a Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum in Davos (2018) and as a Co-Chair of Financial Inclusion at the W20 Summit (2018) in Argentina.
From Mumbai to Mhaswad, Sinha has come a long way. She succeeded because she looked at the familiar problems with fresh eyes. Sinha’s work has several lessons for policymakers, who may think of changing the direction of their discourses. India spends more on programmes for the poor than most developing countries but is not getting the expected dividends that significant public expenditure would seem to warrant. The Government can complement the efforts of crusaders like Sinha by identifying, adapting and successfully scaling up promising interventions instead of rolling out more and more reforms.
(The writer is a reputed development professional)
