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Krishnagiry’s Good Samaritan

By K A Shaji

31 July, 2012
Countercurrents.org

Now in her late nineties, Mathalai Mary still remembers those distant days
in which private moneylenders ruled the roost in her native village
Karipatty near Salem. Mary borrowed Rs 500 from one among them to meet an
unexpected need of her eight member family once but the repayments
including penalty interest in the next one decade came around Rs 50,000.
The whole family had landed in poverty and there was no recovery since
then. Her three sons and two daughters stopped their education at primary
level to ensure a better academic future for their bright brother Kulandei
Francis. The entire family turned landless very soon by selling off their
only piece of land and that too for ensuring University education for
Francis, who shoed exceptional calibre and a philantropical bent of mind
since childhood.

Many years have passed and Mary has turned the leading light over the years
for Kulandei Francis, who so far liberated 1,53,990 women of Krishnagiri
and Dharmapuri districts of Tamil Nadu and their families from the
exploitation of money lenders and provided them a life beyond exploitation.
The movement is catching up the whole Krishnagiri-Dharmapuri belt and
neighbouring taluks of Vellore district. Interestingly, this is the belt
that won international attention in the last two decades because of high
rate of female infanticide and extreme level of poverty. The Kulandei
Francis movement was indeed a silent revolution in the last three decades
of its existence because it never went behind nespaper headlines. Even
those in the nearby Coimbatore and Salem came to know about Francis and his
organisation Integrated Village Devolopment Project (IVDP) only after he
was chosen as one among the six to bag the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay
Award, arguably the Asian equivalent of Noble Prize.

The savings-and-credit groups he formed in the last three decades have
grown into an all-women movement of 8231 SHGs (Self Help Groups) with a
cumulative loan port folio of US $435 million and a reserve fund of US 48.9 million.
The savings of all the SHGs comes around US$ 40 million. While
conferring the award, the award committee found that the IVDP experiment
derves appreaciation as it has turned into a financially disciplined, self-
reliant, member-owned and member-managed organisation. Further more, the
group’s solidarity and access to credit have fuelled sucessful village
programmes in health and sanitation, housing, livelihood and children’s
education, including scholarships, performance-based incentives for
students and schools, a primary school for tribal children and a computare
training academy that so far trained over 5,000 poor children.

The level of ecomic independence brought about by IVDP to the then
impoverished families can be seen in the life of Mankamma, a 36-year-old
mother of three children from Pananthoppu near Vettayampatty. She used to
rear goats while her husband was enaged in masonry work. The income was
less and the family was always in near poverty. It was nine years ago, she
was attracted by the SHG movement and availed a loan of Rs one lakh to
start a rural hardware shop. The shop with modest beginnings is now having
a daily business of more than Rs 1 lakh. ``The amount I had repaid in time
as the business progressed. The SHG given me two more loans and they made
my hardware shop one of the best in the whole area,’’she says with proud.

Rajalakshmi of the same village has a different story to tell as she
apprached the local SHG 12 years ago after her cow died of an uncommon
disease. The cow was the whole source of income for her six member family.
She got a loan to start a small idli shop and the shop is still attracting
food lovers by providing best idlis. When her son completed plus two with
good marks, Rajalkshmi sent him for studies to become a vetrinarian as she
thought that would help protect cows in the region from deaths.

``My role is limited to the level of a facilitator and these wonderful
women are no acting as agents of change in this poor and arid region. My
works were taken seriously by noe so far and so the Magsaysay Award had
turned a shock for me,’’ says Kulandei Francis, while helping an SHG in
making entries in teh accounts register and that too a day after hearing
the award news.

Apart from the SHG revolution, this priest turned social worker is
undertaking numerous initiatives and the latest one is installation of a
computer training centre from inmates of Vellore Central Prison.
Perarivalan, who faces death sentence in the Rajiv Gandhi assasination
case, is now holding the responsibility of imparting computer education to
the inmates using the facility.

Natrampalayam, Anjatty and Kodiyoor on the tri-junction knot of Tamil Nadu,
Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in Krishnagiri was the chosen field of Francis
in the beginning and there he conducted night schools in the light of gas
lamps and small first-aid centres. Then he initiated a micro-watershed
programme and built 331checkdams in sixty agricultural villages in 22 years..

Though Francis began as a Catholic Priest with Fathers of Holy Cross in
1970, he left the order by 1977 and became a full time social activist.
``During my priesthood, I was became part of Caritas India’s (social
service wing of catholic Bishops Conference of India) charity works and was
assigned to work with famine hit people in West Bengal, who were displaced
from bangaldesh following the 1971 war. Then I worked with NGOs in Pune and
Trichy and landed finally in Natrampalayam to devote myself to liberate
people from mone lenders,’’ Francis recalled.

``In the begginning, I used to form SHGs for both men and women. But male
SHGs started collpasing because of many reasons and one among them was
alcoholism. Then I focussed only on women empowerment and that would
benefit men also,’’ he said.

Like many others, Francis also started the movement by dwaing inspiration
from the Micro Credit Movement and he even visited Bangladesh to study
micro credit movement of Muhammed Yunus there. ``Later I found micro credit
movement is not suitable for our people and my SHG project has nothing to
do with it. Organised into clusters and federations, our SHGs are directly
linked to banks through group accounts, bulk deposits and loans that have
given the SHGs the power to leverage preferential bank treatment. These
poor women are managing their finaces effectively and reliably now and even
the profit out of loans and transactions also being shared among them,’’
explains Francis.

Accordiong to him, now the menfolk of the region are realising that women
too can become earning members of the family and support its members. So
the female infanticide trend has started diminishing. Women are getting
respect and they even constitute financial backup of banks operated in the
region, mainly State Bank of India, Pallavan Bank, Bank of India and Indian
Bank.

The SHGs are also undertaking a sanitary napkin movement in the region.
``Personal hygine was a bigger issue here in the past and now our SHGs are
distributing napkins worth rs 25 lakh. Seventy five percent of the women in
the region are getting sanitary napkins through us at 25 percent discount
from companies because of bulk purchase. There is a small profit out of the
distribution even after the discount and even that money si being divided
among the SHG members,’’ says Francis.




 

 


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