Women power

Business India, November 11, 2002

A small group supported by the Deepak Foundation is helping empower women in Gujarat's villages

A constant criticism levelled against NGOs (non-government organizations), says C.K.Mehta, Chairman of Deepak Nitrite Ltd and Deepak Fertilisers and Petrochemicals Ltd, is their weak management systems. Which is why, he explains the Deepak group has provided professional inputs - for accounting systems and human resource policies - to the Deepak Foundation right since the inception in 1982 of the latter's precursor, the Deepak Charitable Trust.

The trust, originally set up to succour Saurashtra's cyclone victims, transformed in the early `90s into working for sustainable community development programmes in health, education, livelihood and women's empowerment in the villages around the Nandesari industrial estate, 20 km from Vadodara, where Deepak Nitrite is based. Deepak Medical Foundation was born along the way, setting up a 15-bed hospital in 1991, also at Nandesari. Together, they form the Foundation, which works to `give back to the community that supplied us with our principal resource - man-power'.

Two decades later, foundation director Aruna Lakhani, who has been with it since its inception, continues to work with her band to fulfil its vision of expanding women's horizons of autonomous decision-making and control over resources and body, becoming equal partners to their men folk to achieve `the ultimate goal of complete development'. "The women we were working with came back and said, `Health is fine, but we need some income,'" says Lakhani.

"So we started approaching the Baroda dairy to help us set up a women's dairy cooperative; but they turned us down at first, because they had bad experience with cooperatives." The then managing director of the Baroda Milk Scheme, however, was very supportive. "It was strange that a man could accept that women could run a dairy," she says. The women of Sakaripura village proved him right: their cooperative made a profit of Rs.18,000 in its first six months, buying milk from the village women at between Rs. 12 and Rs.15 a litre against the maximum of Rs.5 they used to get earlier.

But the money attracted men, who began siphoning off the fat to skim profits. The third time they faced this problem, the women decided to bar men from their cooperative. Today selling 500 litres a day at an average price of Rs.17 a litre, the cooperative earns more than Rs.10 lakhs a year, and so many industries in the area having downed their shutters, the dairy has become the main source of livelihood. "Sakariapura, with its 100 families, became the example; and others asked us to help start cooperative dairies in their villages, too" says Lakhani. Today, the Foundation oversees seven of them, and an eighth is in the pipeline. Lalitaben, Secretary of the Sakariapura cooperative, is determined to learn how to use the computer that is the heart of the fully automated milk collection system that she now relies on her husband to operate. "It will take time. But I will learn," she assets.

At Raika village, the Mahila Dudh Mandal secretary Taraben Rathod operates the computer and the fat measuring meter herself. Her engineer husband, who is village sarpanch, is especially proud of the new self-starting Honda genset, which keeps the milk collection system going.

"The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) supported us, its chairman Amrita Patel takes very keen interest," says Lakhani. The Kheda cooperative didn't bring the same sort of prosperity as it was run by men, who spent most of the money on wine and women. Money in women's hands, she points out, is used better: it goes for children and family, education and health. Actually, says an NDDB spokesman, the concept of women dairy cooperatives predates the Deepak Foundation's work. The Valsad Milk Union in Gujarat, for instance, initiated the concept of all-women dairy cooperative organizations on its own without help from any external agency, while milk unions in Bihar and Rajasthan initiated women's cooperative dairies under a Government of India programme.

NDDB, for its part, is committed to encouraging and preparing women dairy farmers to play their role as cooperative members, employees and leaders. Its women dairy cooperative leadership programme recognizes the role of women in dairying and focuses on increasing their participation as members and leaders in dairy cooperatives. So far, one million women from more than 2,000 dairy cooperative societies linked to 50 district milk unions have become part of the programme. With or without its help, the women of Sakariapura, Raika and half a dozen other villages are looking after themselves and their families.

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