Mary Tigga with husband Bipin and children. Picture by Prashant Mitra

Torpa, Jan. 1: Mary Tigga may not count her chickens before they hatch, but she sure knows how to keep them warm in winter. The 30-year-old brick kiln worker has developed a technology, which has not only changed lives in the Torpa region but has also won her laurels.

Impressed by Tigga’s work, the Citi Group has conferred upon her the Micro Entrepreneur Award 2008 and Planning Commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia gifted her a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh and a medal at a function in New Delhi recently.

Tigga, a housewife-turned-entrepreneur and a mother of two, realised that the death rate of chickens was unusually high in winter. With no electricity in the village, poultry farmers faced difficulty in rearing the birds.

Tigga then thought of a special coal oven. Using a tin plate, she circulated the heat generated by the coal in the poultry farm, thereby reducing deaths in the farm due to season change.

A resident of a humble hamlet of Kudri in Torpa, around 50km from the state capital, Tigga has changed lives for women in the region. “Six years ago, we could not even make ends meet and our whole family had to work in brick kilns to earn a living. After switching to poultry farming, I earn Rs 4,000 a month,” said Tigga, a proud owner of two poultry farms.

She joined the Torpa Grameen Poultry Co-operative Society Limited in 2002 as a member and now the co-operative has as many as 249 women, who have raised their own poultry farms in their houses where Tigga’s idea has been put to use.

Pradan, an NGO that helps women earn from poultry farming, had initially faced difficulty in training women in villages. “But the problem was solved with Tigga’s indigenous technology,” said Prem Shankar, a Pradan member based in Torpa. The NGO has helped several women in the Khunti-Torpa region.

“We have also constituted the Khunti-Torpa Agriculture Co-operative Society and are teaching farmers to produce for the market,” said Prem Vaskar, another official of the organisation.

Tigga’s innovation has not only made poultry farming possible in rural areas without electricity, but has also given them a permanent source of income.

Today, Torpa Grameen Poultry Co-operative has distribution chains in Calcutta, Rourkela and towns of Chhattisgarh, besides Ranchi and Jamshedpur. The co-operative now has employed several village youths.

Partners in Change, an organisation associated with the Citi Group, referred Tigga’s name for the award for the East and North East Zone. And now Tigga is looking forward to more such innovations.

Change, indeed, is good.