These Gujarat women fought orthodoxy, poverty to cultivate a fresh lease of life
They have 1 to 1.5 bighas of land and so have been categorised as marginal land holders. It was a huge fight for them to earn even this land - they fought right from the level of the sarpanch to the government to get themselves registered.
Savita Naik, Navliben, Chandaben and Kamtiben eke out a meagre living in Panchiyasaal village, just about 30 km from the block headquarters of Devgadh Baria in Gujarat's tribal-dominated Dahod district.
They have 1 to 1.5 bighas of land and so have been categorised as marginal land holders. It was a huge fight for them to earn even this land - they fought right from the level of the sarpanch to the government to get themselves registered.
They were not allowed to step out of home and do anything outside. Economics was a strict no-no. But they fought the feudal rural system to make social and economic space for themselves.
Not just these four women, nearly 400 women fought the system to get into vermicompost farming and each one of them is on an average making `25,000 a year through this. Like the Amul model of milk distribution, they have created a procurement centre at the Ratanmahal district headquarters, which takes up all the organic manure produced by these women and sells them.
Before 2007, they were able to cultivate only the kharif crop that was completely dependent on the rains and the yield could feed their families for barely four to five months. They had to migrate to the sparse Saurashtra region looking for work.
"All of us, me, my son, daughter-in-law and their five young children had to take turns to migrate to take up share cropping throughout the year and came together as a family for only two days during Holi in March. We could only get one crop a year with minimum investments," Kamtiben said.
Worse, Navliben had to take loans from a moneylender at a monthly interest of 1.5 per cent to buy fertilisers.
Chandaben's case was no different except that she was an active member of the women's organisation initiated by Area Networking and Development Initiatives (ANANDI). Under the organisation's Sarvangi Vikas Karyakram (holistic development programme), Chandaben fought the social scenario around her to train in vermicompost production. She got Navliben, Kamtiben and three other women to set up a vermicompost production unit.
Within just about 18 months, they were able to complete as many as seven cycles of vermicompost production, churning out as much as 56,950 kg of compost and made around `80,000 between the six of them. "From the total earning of `30,310 between me and my daughterin-law Manju, we bought a buffalo and were able to reclaim our silver necklace mortgaged to the moneylender," Chandaben said.
The story of these 400 women is unique in that over 80 per cent of them are widows, divorced and deserted, Seema Shah, a project coordinator with ANANDI organisation based in Godhra, said.
"It is not just about the vermicompost programme, it is more about pulling out these women from their socioeconomic conditions," Kashiben, a single woman based in Dahod district's Damavav village and programme coordinator, said.
According to Jahnvi Andharia, Executive Director of ANANDI, "besides the money that these women earned as producers of vermicompost, they also got to use the organic fertiliser in their own fields."