It was a Saturday afternoon. Nearly 21 village women were together, sitting in a circle to listen to their secretary Parbati in the weekly meeting.
After a few rounds of discussion, Parbati stood up and spoke, “This year our profit from potato crop is Rs 30,000 which we will invest in farming seasonal vegetables and ragi millet. We had planted 600 kilograms of potatoes and our output was 6,000 kilograms. Do you have any other ideaIJ”
When Parbati Ramagiria, secretary of Maa Bhairabi Swayam Sahayak Sangha (women self help group) of Gulei village in Semiliguda block of Koraput district read out the account statement at their weekly meeting, all twenty one members broke into cheer. The firm voices, the applause and the beaming faces indicated the raised level of confidence and power in these women agricultural labourers, who feared to speak even a single word to outsiders just two years back when they were landless.
This “transformative change” has been brought about by the power of “patta” -the land titles. After squatting on Government land for generations, these women received legal titles to their land-both homestead (4 to 10 cents) and farmland (up to 1 acre each) through a collaborative initiative of the Government of Odisha and landesa, a non-profit oranisation, that has designed the community resource persons (CRP) model to improve and support implementation of the State’s land allocation programme.
The model uses CRPs- a cadre of local literate youths trained to help the poorest families to get titles to their land, which provides equal ownership rights to both women and men.
Soon after receiving the “patta”, Parbati coordinated with Nakula Sisa, their village CRP, who facilitated to access Government livelihood programmes and received a livelihood “starter kit”- 10 ducks, 10 fruit saplings and vegetable saplings. Parbati did not remain content with her new found prosperity. She worked tirelessly to ensure that every single woman in her village has similar benefit from the State programme. With young and agile Parbati’s able leadership, all the village women land owners together formed a self-help group. These women in group availed credit of Rs 50,000 from a nearby public sector bank and started collective farming of potato, onion and ragi millet. They attended training sessions on “land use” conducted jointly by landesa and Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDA), Koraput and learned multi cropping, line-sowing, water management, and other farming techniques. All the women members jointly worked on the field. Though it was difficult for them to leave their small children at home with their mother-in-laws and spend entire day from dawn to dusk in the field but they did it. The women were engaged in all the activities of cultivation-shoveling the field, sowing seeds, removing grass, spraying water, applying manure, collecting the farm produce, sorting and packing in bags for selling them. Parvati along with other women worked closely with Nakula and the ITDA officials to build market outlets for their farm produce.
“The patta has not only provided these poor rural tribal women with a tangible assert, but an identity, self confidence, and the power to change their lives. With the power of patta, these women of Gulei village have found the key to unlock their veiled forte and they are now able to access host of opportunities to participate in economic processes and improve their and their children’s lives,” said landesa State director Sibabrata Choudhury.
More than half (54 per cent) of the rural families in Odisha are still landless. These families do not have “patta” to the piece of land they live on and farm. A sizable number of rural families survive with a meager monthly income of less than Rs 5,000 and 43.35 per cent derive a major part of their income from manual casual labour. Absence of legal titles deprives these families of accessing their entitlements and opportunities. Squatting on Government land and living a transitory life, these families are stuck in the generational cycle of extreme poverty. Worse is the condition of rural woman-headed families who account for about 12 per cent (data Government of Odisha survey in four districts-Ganjam,Koraput, Kalahandi and Mayurbhanj) and the suffering of single women - the widowed, abandoned, disabled and unmarried women who live depending on brothers, in-laws and relatives-is abysmal. Because they not only live in abject poverty, but are vulnerable-often abused by those on whom they depend for food and shelter.
The State Government’s pro-active steps to enumerate all the landless families including the single women and providing them with “patta” to a piece of land would probably bring opportunities like that of the women of Gulei village to every rural woman in the State and all landless rural women would be able to unlock their forte like Parbati Ramagiria.