Bagnan Mahila Bikash Cooperative Credit Society and its smaller sister organisation Bagnan Mahila Bikash Consumer Cooperative Society in Howrah district of West Bengal, together present a great example of bottom up women's mobilisation that has led to self empowerment without the usual NGOisation that is so evident elsewhere.
The journey started in the early 1990s when a Government school teacher Madhuri Ghosh was entrusted with conducting adult education programmes for women in Bagnan Block of Howrah district. She took her responsibility seriously and created a group of women and made them literate. The women said that they found this community space that had been created very good and wanted to continue with it because it provided them with an opportunity to share their problems and discuss them. Soon this evolved into a training centre where they learnt some skills like tailoring and food processing. Other groups were set up in this manner and with the help of the government scheme Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA), the women up scaled their groups. The groups then came together to form the consumer cooperative society to avail of various subsidies and other benefits.
A major change came when the women said that to run their small businesses they needed loans and for this they had to rely on usurious moneylenders and so they could not make headway as all their earnings would go in paying the high interests. So they suggested to Madhuri Ghosh that a savings and credit group should also be started. This soon took off and the women began saving rupees ten every month and once a corpus had been built up over a year the loaning also started. The model was a typical Self Help Group one where the group dynamics operates to ensure that proper loanees are selected and they then pay back the loans in time. Leveraging the mobilisation already done by the consumer cooperative society, the savings and credit associations grew by leaps and bounds and a credit cooperative society was formed.
Currently the credit cooperative society has a membership of 34,000 women and a total savings of Rs 40 crores. The cooperative pays the women about 7% on an average on their savings and charges them 13% on the loans advanced to them. Even though the difference between the two rates is only 6%, the cooperative still makes an annual profit of Rs 1 crore because the operating costs are low as there are no management overheads as the women themselves run the show at reasonable remunerations. There is almost no default though there are about 5% cases in which loans have to be rescheduled. It is run by the women themselves who are the members of the society under the leadership of Madhuri Ghosh and due to the low interest rates on loans the women have flourished in their businesses and improved their livelihoods.
The most important thing is that the organisations have generated funds from their own programmes without having to take grants like NGOs do. They now use the profits to carry out programmes such as renewable energy, sanitation and nutrition gardens. They efficiently deploy their resources in improving their systems. The software that they use for their banking purposes has been developed by them to suit their needs with the help of a software developer. The field staff who collect the savings and disburse the loans keep their records in handheld machines which are then downloaded into the software. This ensures both efficiency and security. So good is their software and operations that they have been adopted by other credit cooperative societies in West Bengal.
The journey started in the early 1990s when a Government school teacher Madhuri Ghosh was entrusted with conducting adult education programmes for women in Bagnan Block of Howrah district. She took her responsibility seriously and created a group of women and made them literate. The women said that they found this community space that had been created very good and wanted to continue with it because it provided them with an opportunity to share their problems and discuss them. Soon this evolved into a training centre where they learnt some skills like tailoring and food processing. Other groups were set up in this manner and with the help of the government scheme Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA), the women up scaled their groups. The groups then came together to form the consumer cooperative society to avail of various subsidies and other benefits.
A major change came when the women said that to run their small businesses they needed loans and for this they had to rely on usurious moneylenders and so they could not make headway as all their earnings would go in paying the high interests. So they suggested to Madhuri Ghosh that a savings and credit group should also be started. This soon took off and the women began saving rupees ten every month and once a corpus had been built up over a year the loaning also started. The model was a typical Self Help Group one where the group dynamics operates to ensure that proper loanees are selected and they then pay back the loans in time. Leveraging the mobilisation already done by the consumer cooperative society, the savings and credit associations grew by leaps and bounds and a credit cooperative society was formed.
The most important thing is that the organisations have generated funds from their own programmes without having to take grants like NGOs do. They now use the profits to carry out programmes such as renewable energy, sanitation and nutrition gardens. They efficiently deploy their resources in improving their systems. The software that they use for their banking purposes has been developed by them to suit their needs with the help of a software developer. The field staff who collect the savings and disburse the loans keep their records in handheld machines which are then downloaded into the software. This ensures both efficiency and security. So good is their software and operations that they have been adopted by other credit cooperative societies in West Bengal.
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