Looking out of the window

A Sangham Meeting in which the weekly finances get discussed

But what if your entire life was to be spent in recession. Waiting it out and waiting to die are one and the same thing and deprivation takes on a whole new level.  That’s unfathomable really. It’ll blow over right. Those large financial corporations and banks will get things up and running in no time. They’ve screwed up before, they’ll fix it as well. It’s why we give them our money, our future hopes and dreams, that house we want to buy and the car that comes with it.

In the arid lands of Medak in  India,  rural  uneducated women are doing the same thing. Every week they turn over their hard earned and microscopic savings to people who they believe will take care of it for them. Who will open savings accounts for them in the nearby post offices and give them the financial skills to operate it. For these women, these savings are not about a swanking new SUV. It’s about escaping generations of debt that has pushed them into years of wage labour without a better future in sight. It’s about being able to free their tiny areas of mortgaged land so that they have something to leave for their children.

Rural poverty is something we can all pretend to understand. It’s all about using the right words, the sympathetic gestures and the apt amount of   righteous indignation. But it really startles you when you confront it face to face and you find yourself not sympathising so much as grappling with the sheer deprivation that exists in the heartlands of every country.  These are the people that globalization and the bandwagon that goes with it missed out on. Yet they bear the costs without a tangible benefit in sight. Their village water resources are bled dry to fuel cola company plants for urban consumers. They’re the ones left hanging dry when IMF reforms force states to rollback on their aid, so that capital can flow into the cities and give them the much desired structures of glass and steel.

Travelling across the Medak region of  Andhra Pradesh in India about 170 km from the capital and IT hub of Hyderabad, I met many women who come under what is understood as the ultra-poor category which as defined by the World Bank includes people who earn less than  1 US $ a day.  These women are part of the pilot ultra-poor programme started by the SKS foundation, the NGO wing of SKS one of the largest micro finance institutions in the country.

Operating from Narayankhed in Andhra Pradesh, it covers four hundred odd families across a hundred villages in the region.  Under this program, single women who are the only earning members of their family without any financial assets such as property or live stock are given grants to acquire an asset like a buffalo or a goat to supplement their income from farm labour which gets them around Rs. 40 a day ($0.791) for 15 days in a month. 

Using the livestock for milk or labour assures them a secondary source of income and a minimal saving that ranges from Rs.10 ( $ 0.198) to Rs 50 ( $ 0.988) a week. They deposit these savings with a field assistant from SKS who records their weekly income and expenditure and advises them on health and financial decision making. It’s a two year intervention which is due to end in a few months following which the women would ideally have two sources of income and saving capacity that could improve their standard of living.

A house visit in progress

Talking to these women is an enriching experience. They open up easily, ready to pour their troubles to anyone who’ll listen. They’re not necessarily looking for any help, only someone who’ll patiently listen. It’s a common lament across thee three villages I travel to. Summer is a particularly tough time, as the cattle don’t yield a lot of milk and there is a dearth of employment in the farms. At these times, they get by on reserve stock of food grains from last year and manage to make ends meet by selling stone from residual quarrying, gathering and selling firewood or collecting leftover harvest from threshing.

Meeting these women leads me to believe, how wrong our approach can sometimes be. To understand them as hapless and oppressed in our romantic imagination of third world poverty, without any agency of their own is a great disservice to them even if our hearts should be in the right place. They’re strong and resilient people who try and make better existences for themselves and their families even when the odds are heavily against them. Even in the face of the heart wrenching poverty that they face, I find it difficult to pity them or feel sorry for them because they’re so full of grit and determination to change their lives for the better.

It also leads me to think why financial capitalism has no place for people like these. If it did, we probably wouldn’t be facing this colossal economic bust. A lot of micro-credit and finance  studies have shown that while the largest of corporations default on  millions of dollars of debt that get written off year after year by  banks and firms, the poor are often much more dependable and low risk clients who pay up their loans with efficiency. Why then can’t they be offered financial services suited to their needs that can make all the difference to their basic existence? They may not understand or care about mutual funds or stock markets, but it’s a pretty safe bet that they understand the value of money more than anybody else.