Few models of poverty upliftment have transformed lives. Here is one which is near-perfect.
A tangible success of his mission has been that his below poverty line women volunteers today have savings worth Rs 305 crore. They have also disbursed Rs 510 crore as loans in just three years. The savings have come in the form of weekly single denomination rupee contributions from women volunteers. "We’ve created wealth out of poverty," says Jose, who turned the unglamorous poverty eradication venture into an opportunity for capacity building.
His close association with a bunch of similarly committed ias officers who had developed miniature models in a few wards encouraged him to give a new direction to the venture.
An MSc in statistics, plus an mba, Jose has closely studied deprivation. It was he who lent a new benchmark for poverty evaluation. Poverty was multi-factorial; not just physical wants. He rejected the old calorie- income-based poverty indexing, replacing it with a nine-point deprivation risk index. A widow or an alcoholic’s presence was reckoned as a factor of deprivation. Family-based poverty is a generational pessimism stemming from social disadvantages, penury and all-round failures.
It’s a rare work culture that has contributed to their success. Work at the Kudumbashree office in Thiruvananthapuram goes on well past 9 pm. When Outlook met him Jose was surrounded by his staff. They were collecting assessment reports sent online by their district offices. And this in Kerala where strikes and rallies are the order of the day.
The ubiquitous Kudumbashree woman has laid her hands on almost every venture—IT units, garbage collection, dial-a-job club, jeevani-jaiva cloth bag unit, leased land farming on 25,000 acres, solid waste management and tuition centres for weak students are all part of the multi-pronged approach to tackling deprivation in one’s neighbourhood.
No wonder then that Kudumbashree has won kudos at the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management meet for three consecutive years. Kudumbashree is also Asia’s largest women grouping of its kind. The aim is "to eradicate absolute poverty in 10 years through concerted community action under the leadership of local governments. It facilitates organisation of the poor, combining self-help with the demand-led convergence of available services and resources to tackle the multiple dimensions and manifestation of poverty holistically".
Jose cites the case of Lily Menon, a Kudumbashree activist, adjudged the best entrepreneur at the recently held Business2Business in Kochi. Her soap unit in Kozhikode is already the envy of multinational detergent majors. "Such micro-level successes have made entrepreneurs think in terms of a life beyond years of absolute poverty," says Planning Board member-secretary S.M. Vijayanand who along with Jose also played a key role in evolving the Kudumbashree model.
Jose set up grassroots-level neighbourhood groups (NHGS), each having 15-20 women. Each nhg elects five "barefoot specialists", assigned specific areas of work. Ten to 15 NHGS federated at the ward level make up the Area Development Society (ADS). All ADSs in the panchayat together make up the Community Development Society. There are in all 1,31,503 NHGS, 13,780 ADSs and 1,049 CDSs. They meet every week, discuss common problems and evolve solutions.
For details contact: Kudumbashree, State Municipal House, Thiruvananthapuram-695010; email: spem@asianetindia.org or pem@md4.vsnl.net.in Tel: 0471-2728320. Fax: 0471-2724205.