The Hindu Business Line : Peace and empowerment

"Sometimes in a single group there are Hindu, Christian and Muslim women. What matters is not their religion but the fact that you're a poor woman and I'm a poor woman and let's work together to improve our lot."

I want to break this law," says 24-year-old Tahmina, the daughter of Hamida Begum, a Grameen Bank borrower for eight years. The "law" she is referring to is the custom of giving dowry or jotu when a girl gets married. A Masters in Zoology, Tahmina, who is now doing LLB, is angry at the very mention of this heinous custom.

We are seated in her house in a small town near Dhamrai, about 35 km from Dhaka. Hers is obviously an educated family; her father Alauddin Ahmed retired from the Government Institute of Technology in Chittagong as a technical assistant a few years ago. Hamida Begum has taken two loans; a basic loan of Taka 37,000 and an educational loan of Taka 36,000 to educate Tahmina. The girl used to commute by bus the 15-km distance to her college every day. The education loan needs to be repaid by the student after he/she finds a job.

The "Grameen culture" (which keeps spreading the anti-dowry message to its 6.7 million borrowers) combined with the confidence that her education has given her, has strengthened Tahmina's resolve of "not marrying a man who expects to get money in return for marrying me."

Golden egg

Raising her voice she says, "I'm an educated person, why should I pay this? My father and mother spent money to educate me, and now they have to pay more money? My education will ensure that I will get a good job and that way my husband will be getting a golden egg from me every day. So where is the need to pay money to get married?" She has also decided that she is going to marry "an educated person... somebody like a district magistrate, because my family... we're only three sisters without any brother... needs a learned man. Of course doctors and engineers are good but they are more interested in earning money. I'd like to marry somebody who serves society as well."

Her inspiration, clearly, is the Grameen Bank founder and Managing Director Muhammad Yunus, who along with the Grameen Bank, has won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006. "He has made sure that the whole world will now know what Bangladesh is," she says with pride.

When surprise is expressed that in a Muslim family 24-year-Tahmina, and her older sister Anwara (26), who is now graduating as there was a break in her studies when the father retired, are still not married, Ershad, a Grameen Bank employee accompanying us around the villages, says, "Earlier women in the villages and small towns used to marry their daughters at 15 - 16; but now most Grameen women get their daughters married at 20-22." The refusal to pay dowry is also a reason, "and it's difficult to find the right kind of man to match our standards, as we are an educated family", Tahmina says. She's sure that sooner than later she'll find a man who'll respect her more than the money she could have brought.

At the Dhamrai centre of Grameen Bank, which has about 4,600 members, the branch manager Abdul Alim does not need a computer or written data to reel off information about the Grameen women, and the loan taken by each. Occupying pride of place in his branch is 50-year-old Jahanara Begum from Kakran village, who has been a Grameen borrower for 18 years. She began with a small loan of Taka 3,000 to make puffed rice; the last loan she took was for Taka 12 lakh for buying a cargo boat, which she rents out to ferry sand and other building material. Every week she has to repay Taka 14,600, "and she is able to do that comfortably," says Alim, adding that the average interest rate charged for different Grameen loans is a flat 10 per cent.

He explains that over the years, the Grameen policy has changed in that earlier while only the woman took a loan and carried out a small enterprise, "now, though the loan is in the woman's name, her whole family gets involved in the venture."

Khadija Begum from Keliya village is another Grameen veteran and she has borrowed Taka 2.5 lakh; "her elder son is a dealer in motor parts and he handles this part of the family business." Several years ago Khadija had taken a loan of Taka 15,000 to buy two cows and she sells the milk in the local market at Taka 22-24 a litre; the price of milk in Dhaka ranges from Taka 30-40. She too has taken Grameen loans for 18 years, and her family has two CNG agencies and a `baby taxi' (auto rickshaw) apart from the motor parts business.

They were poor once

Success story: Dilwara, with her daughter Pinky, in front of her fishpond.

Dilwara is another successful `businesswoman'; the latest loan she has taken is for Taka 1 lakh for husking paddy. She owns three fishponds, sells garments and operates a mobile service too in her village! When you protest that all these are relatively well-off women, and wasn't Grameen meant to help poor women, Alim smiles and says, "But they were all poor women when they came to us 18, 15 or 12 years ago; the majority of first-time borrowers are poor. Dilwara used to live in a little hut and was divorced by her husband. Every day there would be a quarrel on the small dowry she brought; now she runs so many different ventures; her brother and her daughter Pinky, now in high school, help her."

Of the 4,600-odd members at the Grameen centre in Dhamrai, about 500 are Hindu women, "but neither we nor the group members themselves make any difference between them". As Yunus points out, "When we began I was told that Muslim and Hindu women will never come and work together in a centre. So I said: `It's up to them, I can't force anybody'." But three decades down the line, he is happy to note that "not only do they come to the same centre, sometimes in a single group there are Hindu, Christian and Muslim women. And what matters to them is not their religion but the fact that you're a poor woman and I'm a poor woman and let's work together to improve our lot."

At the Dhamrai centre, says Alim, about 1,000 women are first-time borrowers and their loan amounts range from Taka 1,000-7,000. You soon realise that this is one of Grameen's most successful centres. The repayment rate here is cent percent, says the beaming manager, who himself has been with Grameen Bank for 12 years, adding that sometimes there might be a delay in the weekly payment but there is no default. What is even more difficult to believe is his assertion that there are no professional moneylenders in this region.

So what happens if the women require more money/loans than Grameen can provide?

"They now have the means and confidence to go to the commercial banks," he says, adding that there have been complaints of corruption in some of those institutions. Some of the women have become quite deft at managing both Grameen and commercial bank loans. When Dilwara tells you that she paid Taka 7 lakh for her third and biggest fishpond, you realise that some smart juggling of capital and interest is going on in some business ventures run by these women.

Business of beauty

Shamsun Nahar Lovely attends to a client at her beauty parlour in Dhamrai.

Lovely (her given name is Shamsun Nahar) runs a beauty parlour in Dhamrai and business is booming as women in small and big towns of Bangladesh have become beauty conscious. "And, the girls of Dhamrai are fast and fashionable" is the cheeky comment of her brother Shamsul Haq, who goes to college and helps her in the evenings at the adjoining shop selling cosmetics and toiletries.

With an original loan of Taka 5,000, supplemented by a similar amount from her personal funds, Lovely did a full-fledged beauty course from an upmarket beauty parlour in Dhaka and is today a successful beautician herself.

So how much does she charge for a facial?

"Between Taka 160-1,000 depending on what the woman wants," replies the confident woman, whose business surges during the marriage and festival seasons as women come for "mehndi, hair cutting, colouring and streaking and make-up". Her husband, incidentally, "helps" her in minding the shop; a statement that says a lot about the kind of silent revolution that Yunus has brought into the lives of Bangladesh's rural women.

Phone ladies

Attahur Rehman, project officer at the Grameen centre, says this centre has given out 37 higher education loans and has 243 phone ladies — women who operate their mobiles as PCOs — mostly through a small shop and sometimes delivering service at the house of the clients who expect calls from their children living overseas on Sundays. In these cases, more than the tariff, the tip is the incentive. Interestingly enough, the bulk of the calls are made to the US, for which the charge Taka 20 a minute is cheaper than Taka 30 for Europe and 25 for Saudi Arabia!

As we come out of Dilwara's house in Chandrail village, about 38 km from Dhaka, and she hastily covers her head on sighting a bearded man, one wonders aloud if he is a Mullah. "Oh no, he is a businessman who is one of my phone customers," laughs Dilwara, adding that unlike in the earlier years the Mullahs are not creating any problem for Grameen women, as now the loans given to them are also helping their husbands, brothers and sons to make a decent living.

When poverty loses...

Beneficiaries all: Gowri and Manju are successful borrowers from Grameen Bank

In Gopinathpur, five km from Dhamrai, where 50 of the 200 families are Hindu and the rest Muslim, Kallani Rani has taken a loan of Taka 60,000 to set up a grocery shop. She too began with a small loan but is now able to absorb more credit. She is a symbol of the fact that when you are poor and struggling to make a living, there is no time or space for communal strife.

Islampur is a village with 200 families and 30 of these are Hindu; but Gowri Rani Sarkar, who has been a Grameen borrower for 12 years with her last loan being for Taka 35,000 to start a potato business, says there is no communal tension in the village. "Nobody thinks she is a Muslim or a Hindu, we all live like friends." Her neighbour Manju Sarkar — loan of Taka 10,000 for a small shop of motor parts — became a Grameen bank member six years ago after watching Gowri's life improve.

Today they are very good friends and Manju's daughter Simul, who is studying Bengali literature in college, and her younger sister spend most of their free time in the house of Gowri, who has no children.

Gowri visits her relatives in Kolkata once in two years and Simul is full of inquiries about her favourite Bollywood icon John Abraham. Thinking of Tahmina's tirade against jotu, one asks her if she will give dowry when she gets married. Simul's reply is a smile; but Manju says that even though the Grameen women are always told to protest against social evils such as dowry, "our culture is such that we have to give something. We don't call it dowry; you can say the money is given to carry out decorations at the time of marriage."

The Grameen branch manager Alim does an on-the-spot analysis on how much Simul's parents will have to dish out as dowry. "Normally it would be a few lakh Taka, but since Simul is a very good-looking girl, the price will come down." Hardly amused, the teenager says: "I don't like this custom of giving dowry, but because it's a very strong cultural thing, my parents will have to give dowry."

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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