Women preferring Harit Prayas than any other project!

Baruapura is one of the target villages of Hari Prayas at Jhansi. It is situated almost 22 kms from JCSS office. The cluster coordinator Ms. Malti Devi is incharge of this village. This village lacks transportation and she has to face a lot of difficulty in reaching this village. Sometime she has to reserve the vehicle or sometime she has to walk for kilometers. The demography of the village is mixed. But people are poor and marninalised across the castes. Indeed some of them are in good economic condition but the SC/STs are in bad economic and social condition.

The cluster coordinator started the process of formation of Mahila Mandal in this village. Two SHGs are being formed in this village. One of them is the older group which had defunct due to some reasons. Geeta, Santoshi, Rajkumari, Chanda etc became the part of emerging groups. In between, Mr. Ramkumar, working in NABARD’s Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Samooh project contacted the same women to form SHG under NABARD’s project. But the women denied. They said to him that in your project you people from the SHGs only for the sake of achieving the target/data. But under Harit Prayas project they will be receiving SHG management training, they will be linked with IGA and they will learn how to secure their livelihood. On the other hand under Rajiv Gandhi project either there is no provision of all these or they do not receive these trainings. And they may be trapped under debt.

So, Mr. Ramkumar contacted the cluster coordinator and said its getting difficult for him to form SHG in this village due to specific characteristic of project Harit Prayas.

And finally two Mahila Mandals is being formed in this village namely 1. Jyoti mahila samooh and 2. Radha-krishna mahila samooh.

# Till now JCSS was facing difficulty in forming women groups due to the activities of other NGOs/ Govt Projects but this month JCSS witnessed a good change in the mindset of the target people.

By Team HARIT PRAYAS, JCSS-Jhansi