The Hindu Business Line : `Group of nine' vs moneylenders

Ms Medha Samant started the Pune branch of Annapurna Mahila Mandal, in 1993. Her first project was to give loans to nine market women. She recalls, "Women in the marketplace were having big problems with unscrupulous moneylenders who charged exorbitant interest rates and harassed them daily on the job."

Back then the women didn't seem to have any option either. "Since they had to buy fresh produce everyday and they needed cash on a daily basis, moneylenders were their only source of funds," reads a narrative about the Mandal included in `Grass-roots NGOs by women for women: The driving force of development in India,' by Ms Feminda Handy, Ms Meenaz Kassam, Ms Suzanne Feeney and Ms Bhagyashree Ranade, from Sage (www.indiasage.com) .

To Ms Samant, her mother, Ms Prematai Purao, was a big source of inspiration. Ms Purao had started the Mandal in Mumbai in 1975. "I watched my mother fight for displaced women mill workers who had become entangled with ruthless moneylenders... My mother knew about a new source of funding, an alternative to moneylenders."

What was that? "Newly, nationalised banks were required to give one per cent of their loans to the poor. She approached the banks and launched a lending programme for slum women." In a recent interview, posted on www.indianngos.com, Ms Purao mentions that more than two lakh women have been given finance from bank. "Ms Purao was an underground freedom fighter in the revolution against the Portuguese in Goa in the 1940s. Ms Prematai not only carried messages back and forth across lines, but participated in the fighting, and still bears visible scars from the bullet and knife wounds she suffered in the revolution," retells the book.

In Pune, though, her daughter was worried about how moneylenders would react to the Mandal's activities. Would they come after Annapurna or further victimise their women borrowers? "She need not have worried because the `group of nine' market women developed their own strategy to take care of the moneylenders." Strategy? Yes, "they decided to meet the moneylenders each day with a promise to pay the next day." Then? "On the following day they would do the same."

Read on: "They kept up with this strategy long enough to frustrate the moneylenders who no longer found it profitable to harass the women or attempt to make them new loans." There were many moneylenders in the marketplace, but they were not organised, and so the strategy of the `group of nine' worked, and the moneylenders left the marketplace.

In a decade, the Mandal gave more than 12,000 loans, and there were no defaults. "The 100 per cent repayment record has been the envy of every bank in Pune. In fact, bank officers come to Ms Medha and ask, `How do you do it? Can you show us?"

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