Kudumbashree
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A backgrounder
As in 2023
Sandip G, May 15, 2023: The Indian Express
Beside Shiny’s unfenced house, where the neighbourhood congregation of ‘Kudumbashree’ is scheduled, is a muddied puddle almost as large as a pond, left behind by an untimely summer shower. A scattered group of women, of varying age-groups, mostly in synthetic saris, neatly tip-toe over the pool, occasionally faltering and splashing both water and laughter. Shiny, wearing an effortless smile, quips: “No one jumps, no wonder we failed miserably in the sports meet.” A peel of laughter ripples through the humid air, even as they hurriedly gush into the drawing room, their sandals and slippers flooding the slushy courtyard of the house in Kottayam district’s Eranjal.
Soon after, the Kudumbashree meeting begins.
As Kudumbashree completes 25 years of change on May 17, it is now arguably the largest women’s collective in the world, with its members involved in a variety of streams, from farming to catering, waste collection to tailoring, running hotels to matrimonial agencies, making street lights to reusable sanitary napkins, engaged in organic farming and agribusiness, crusading against dowry to carrying out rescue operations during floods. It runs 49,200 micro-enterprises — 31,589 individual units and 17,611 group enterprises. So ubiquitous that in every half a kilometre in the state, you bump into one initiative or the other of Kudumbashree.
By 3 pm, Shiny’s house is so packed and noisy that your head begins to buzz. A quick headcount stops at 23, happily compressed into Shiny’s narrow hall. Some have uncomplainingly sprawled on the floor. A middle-aged member says, “It’s the sign of unity and friendship,” and rattles out a well-worn Malayalam proverb, roughly translated as, “If there is unity, you can even sleep on a pestle.” At the centre of the hall is a curry bowl in which 500- and 200-rupee notes fidget under a heavy paperweight.
The meetings, though, do not always flow cordially or smoothly. Disagreements and debates abound. “Like how friends and relatives quarrel occasionally. If there are 50-odd people, there are 50 ideas. At the end of the day, we are all friends and neighbours and we forget the arguments and make a decision that is for the common good,” says Shiny.
What began as a poverty eradication vehicle, conceived by the E K Nayanar-led LDF government and initiated under the State Poverty Eradication Mission (SPEM), has not only achieved its primary mission long ago, but has also emerged as a symbol of social alleviation, besides being an invisible chain that has linked every corner of the state and changed the lives of nearly 50 lakh women, all from different societal strata. “Only monsoon perhaps has a better coverage of the state than us,” says Shiny.
50 lakh members, 3 lakh neighbourhood groups
According to the 2021 National Multidimensional Poverty Index (that captures, besides monetary poverty, deprivations in education, health and other living standards), only 0.71 per cent of the population in Kerala is multi-dimensionally poor, the lowest in the country. Before the launch of Kudumbashree, the poverty ratio of rural and urban Kerala was 25.76 per cent and 24.59 per cent respectively. By 2011-12, according to Rangarajan Committee on Poverty Estimation, the poverty ratio in Kerala had declined to 7.3 per cent (rural) and 5.3 per cent (urban) respectively.
Talking of the impact of the programme on the lives of people in the state, CPI(M) leader T M Thomas Isaac, economist, former minister of finance, and one of the visionaries in the setting up of Kudumbashree, told The Indian Express, “The impact and influence (of Kudumbashree) have been tremendous when you look at it from a social as well as financial perspective, also in how it has mobilised women in the state. It might have its flaws… but it is participatory and provides an opportunity or a platform for betterment.”
As things stands, Kudumbashree’s 46,16,837 members have organised themselves into 3,09,667 neighbourhood groups (or NHGs, called ayalkootam in Malayalam). The neighbourhood group is the primary level unit of Kudumbashree that has a three-tier hierarchy. The next rung is the Area Development Society (ADS) that functions at the level of the ward, followed by the Community Development Society that works at the local government. The NHGs usually begin with thrift and credit programmes, lending money to members using the group’s savings. Subsequently, NHGs are graded and once they qualify, they are eligible for bank loans.
These loans address the immediate financial needs of the group members. Subsequently, the state government supplies grants and subsidies, besides administrative support. Banks provide loans to members at low interest rates. The total thrift collected by NHGs in the state, according to Kudumbashree’s website, stands at Rs 5,786.69 crore and the internal loans generated are to the tune of Rs 23,852.45 crore.
There has also been emphasis on uplifting the lives of the tribal population — over the past 10 years, about 1,06,162 tribal families were covered under 6,375 NHGs.
The model has marvelled the world too. From making it to the UN Habitat’s Best Practices Global 100 List in 2002 to being picked as a model for poverty eradication and women empowerment by the International Training for Programme for Developing Countries, its fame and functionality have travelled beyond the boundaries of the state. In 2018, a four-member team travelled to Azerbaijan to provide a 10-day training camp, besides rendering similar workshops in 10 other states.
But beyond the significant but cold numbers, Kudumbashree’s biggest contribution has been in the way it has changed and influenced, and now defines, the lives of almost half the state’s population of women.
‘Not a self-help group’
After the economic acceleration of the 1980s, the challenges the state faced in the 1990s acquired different dimensions. The standard of living had improved, yet conventional job sectors were drying up and the old developmental models needed a rethink.
At the same time, households could no longer depend on single-member incomes, especially among the lower middle class. Despite being principal caregivers, women often faced a heavy burden of unremunerated household chores while battling discrimination, gender stereotypes and low social standing.
The need of the time, said Isaac, who was then member of the State Planning Board, was “democratic decentralisation”, which, on the face of it, seemed antithetical to the ideals of his party that stood for democratic centralisation.
“It was about decentralisation as a social movement, not a bureaucratic one. It was not about planning as a technique or tool, but a social mobilisation tool, a value system, as a process of widening political democracy,” recounts Isaac.
The buzzword was development from below, the grassroots. There were precedents, even if those were on a smaller scale. In the late 70s, Gandhian ideologue D Pankajakshan Kurup had initiated a similar three-tier programme in Alappuzha district, starting with the tharakootam (neighbourhood within neighbourhood), followed by ayalkootam (neighbourhood groups) and then gramakootam (village groups).
Inspired, many similar endeavours sprung up in various parts of the state. In the mid-80s, the government set up NHGs for implementing India’s Poverty Alleviation programme for the urban poor. There was also the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, wherein the members would spare time teaching the illiterate. Isaac, too, was one of the volunteers. “We studied the social and economic impact (of some of these projects) and put forth the most radical democratic decentralisation process in the country (for Kudumbashree). It was the first time in the country that a development plan was drawn up at the grassroots level,” he says.
Care was made to promote Kudumbashree as a neighbourhood group rather than a self-help group. “SHGs could turn out to be sectarian, divided on caste and community lines. The whole purpose would get complicated,” he says. Subsequently, a special task force comprising S M Vijayanand, secretary of the Local Self Government Department, responsible for the State Urban Poverty Alleviation (UPA) Project Cell; Isaac, member of State Planning Board; and Dr Prakash Bakshi of NABARD recommended the setting up of a SPEM. The formation of SPEM was announced in the state budget of 1997-98 and then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee inaugurated the mission in Malappuram on May 7, 1998.
Eateries to matrimonial portal
Beads of sweat dripping over her forehead, Shahida P, patiently explains to a regular customer why she had run out of beef fry. “We didn’t get the usual quantity of meat today, that’s why. I will keep a plate for you tomorrow,” she tells him before returning to the crammed, but clean, kitchen of the Kudumbashree Janakeeya Hotel in Kottayam, one of the 1,200-odd Kudumbashree-run eateries in the state.
The ‘hotels’ became a blockbuster across the state, thanks to the subsidised rates. A full meal with six dishes comes for Rs 20, a plate of sardine fry costs Rs 40 and beef fry costs Rs 70. For each plate, they get a subsidy of around Rs 10 from the government. “Just because it is cheaper does not mean that we cook in bad oil or reuse our oil. It’s just that we don’t look to make landslide profits like the private hotels. We are happy with what we get,” says Shahida.
Until a few years ago, she was a housewife. But when her husband’s income ran dry — he worked as a daily-wage labourer with a road repair group and lost his job when the company began to recruit cheaper labour from West Bengal, Assam and Jharkhand — she made up her mind to “start something”. That’s when a friend persuaded her to join the neighbourhood group and open the restaurant. “This is the best decision I have made in my life,” she says. “I can support my family, I can pay my children’s fees, and I don’t need to ask my husband for money to buy clothes.”
Financial liberation for women is inarguably the most positive outcome of the mission.
Raji R, of Vayalar, a town in Alappuzha, dreaded Sunday afternoons. Her father had defaulted on a loan he had taken for her brother’s business and the goons of the moneylender would turn up every week to demand the interest amount. “They would barge in, brandish knives and pass lewd jokes, even threaten to take us (the women) if we didn’t pay the interest on time. As you would know, the interest rates were huge. It has changed now,” says Raji, who runs a coir factory under Kudumbashree.
Over the years, Kudumbashree has emerged as not only a platform for empowerment but also a sisterhood society. That was the thought behind Sindhu Balan’s matrimonial portal. “I saw news of a wedding fraud and was upset. It happens quite frequently in Kerala, and the targets are often girls from lower middle-class backgrounds, who have neither the awareness nor the resources for detailed background checks. If only they had checked, I thought. So I thought, why not start a Kudumbashree matrimonial, because we have branches in almost every ward in the state. So the background check would be easier,” explains Sindhu, a former CDS chairperson.
Whenever a potential groom registers on the portal, the group passes on the information to the ward, where the members dig up details of the person and the family, besides checking with the police station to see if they have a criminal background. Her Kudumbashree unit availed a loan of Rs 6 lakh from a local bank and employed three staff members who work out of Sindhu’s one-room office. Now she has five offices, a presence across the state and has quadrupled her staff strength, en route to helping arrange nearly 200 weddings.
If it was the safety of brides that prompted Sindhu’s project, it was rotting tapioca in her backyard after the floods of 2018 that fuelled Beenamma Peter and friends from Kuravilangad to come up with the idea of starting a tapioca unit, where they now make everything from tapioca fry to tapioca ‘Lays’.
Beenamma, who retired as a nurse from the Gulf, found a shed behind her house and took a loan of Rs 3 lakh to start the unit. But as demand for the tapioca products — now marketed as ‘Granny’s Food Products’— soared, she moved to a larger building. “Tapioca is the staple crop in our part of the world (in upper Kottayam), and I felt sad when tonnes of tapioca lay rotting in our backyards after the flood. So I wondered, why not do something useful with the tapioca? Initially we used to sell in local bakeries. It became a hit and we started our factory.” The factory is now worth Rs 50 lakh and provides livelihood for five families on a regular basis. The success stories are endless, but a few stand out.
Several glass ceilings smashed
A few years ago, Thahira was scared of pulling a fused bulb out of its holder. Now, she and her five colleagues assemble LED bulbs and tubes for a living in Alappuzha district’s Pallana, on the banks of a river that gave the village its name. “We wanted to do something different. Restaurants and farming had become mainstream, so we decided to join a one-week camp to learn about assembling LED bulbs. We totally enjoyed it,” she says.
She knew she was stepping into a man’s world, but that did not fluster her. “There is nothing that we lack. What they can, we can as well,” she says.
Some 600 kilometres from Pallana, in Nileswaram, a group of Kudumbashree-backed women not only manufacture bulbs and street lights but also repair street lights.
Perhaps the biggest gender-bender was when a group of women performed the sinkarimelam (a percussion ensemble performance) at a temple in Kozhikode’s Kuruvattoor. A decade after their first performance, they have played in almost 2,000 venues in and outside the state.
And then there’s Omana of Kinaloor, who climbs coconut trees with the ease of climbing stairs. A week’s training was all she required to grasp the nuances of the technique. She charges around Rs 35 a day and collects roughly Rs 1,000.
Another group of women in Ernakulam district are tour operators, taking tourists in wooden canoes around the Kuttambuzha waterfalls. Tilling the soil to working at construction sites or even honey extraction have in the past been largely the preserve of men. No longer, though.
With the swelling bundle of success stories, the perceptions of men too have gradually changed. “Initially, no one was willing to rent us rooms to start the hotel. They had doubts of all sorts, as if we are doing something shady. But it has changed now, and they realise the value of women going to work,” says Shahida. In fact, two of her hands in the hotel are middle-aged men. Besides social mobility, the movement has armed women with political mobility too. Of the 11,000-odd seats reserved for women, 7,038 were won by active Kudumbashree members in the 2020 local body elections, up from 848 in 2005.
With success tales have come failures too. Not every project has been successful. There are hundreds of initiatives that did not catch fire; not everyone could eke out a consistent livelihood; income tends to fluctuate; inconsistent weather has ravaged those in the farming industry; the pandemic and lockdown have taken their toll; and there have been complaints about unpaid subsidies and corruption. There were allegations that subsidies were stalled during the lockdown and nearly 200 eateries were shut.
There is scope for scaling up the mission too. “It has to go beyond the realm of a micro-finance enterprise to become a micro-enterprise. With it comes more branding too, which could be better. We could bring more younger women too into the group. Now, we are looking at this as an employment-generation platform. It would be more successful if we can create revenue-earning jobs,” says Isaac.
Yet, there is little doubt that the mission has changed and defined lives. As Shiny puts it, “Kudumbashree has also made us strong enough to come out of tragedies and setbacks.”
That perhaps is the biggest legacy of the country’s largest such collective, which has now evolved into an identity — the women of Kudumbashree.
