The incumbent Nitish Kumar government in Bihar transferred Rs 10,000 to each of the 7.5 million women ahead of the assembly elections, the results of which will be declared today. Political analysts are keenly watching how the women in Bihar will vote. The state has witnessed record-breaking voting, with the turnout among women being more than eight percentage points higher than men, a trend that pollsters say will have a bearing on the outcome.
Apparently, the money was meant for starting micro enterprises. It would be a folly to imagine 7.5 million women of Bihar suddenly becoming entrepreneurs. The move is no doubt a bribe paid through the pockets of taxpayers. The fact that the cash-strapped Bihar government decided to shell out Rs 7,500 crore in one stroke to some of the poorest women to start their own enterprises raises questions but it is in line with political parties of all hues transferring cash benefits to women electorate to win its support in elections: the Eknath Shinde-led government began the Ladki Bahin Yojana after the National Democratic Alliance’s debacle in the Lok Sabha elections to reap a bumper dividend in the assembly polls; the Bharatiya Janata Party used it effectively in the Madhya Pradesh elections too. States need huge budgetary allocations for these schemes — for instance, Maharashtra must spend Rs 36,000 crore on the Ladki Bahin Yojana — but the benefits do not offset the sorry living conditions of the many women or their families.
This trend is a major departure from the State’s herculean efforts through the 1990s and 2000s to bolster livelihood opportunities for women through the self-help-group movement and livelihood missions. Take, for instance, Bihar’s mobilisation of some nine million women under rural livelihood missions as part of the umbrella self-help group, Jeevika. It ushered in a major transformation in its early phase, when the World Bank gave a big loan for gendering rural livelihoods, and it happened during the second term of Nitish Kumar. But it failed to attain the next stage, where more investments and capacity building were needed to aid women to start small and micro collective enterprises.
Kerala and Tamil Nadu did that with élan — Kerala’s Women Empowerment and Poverty Eradication Mission, Kudumbashree, does not look at women as petty beneficiaries but as agents of change. Ditto in Tamil Nadu, which used the money smartly to create livelihoods and build capacities, though even those states need to invest more in their respective programmes. Naveen Patnaik tried hard to collectivise women in his state under the Mission Shakti programme, taking a leaf from Kudumbashree, and succeeded to some extent.
Across the Indians countryside, nearly 100 million women are part of the SHG networks under the National Livelihood Mission but all that seems tripping in the face of two trends: the catastrophic spread of microfinance firms (rural and urban poor women are caught in vicious debt traps with these firms) and political parties departing from their promise of building sustainable livelihoods for women and instead choosing to pay one-time political dole to win elections.
Creating sustainable livelihoods in lagging geographies takes time, is laborious and may not pay political dividends, but it is a prerequisite for the nation’s growth. One-time financial doles pave the road to political victory, but they are short-sighted. It was the BJP that chose this option first in Madhya Pradesh, and others followed suit. Millions of Bihari women are in the grip of a vicious cycle of microfinance loans as rural livelihoods have collapsed. Forget starting micro enterprises, they cannot find paltry livelihoods in their native places. Thousands are juggling multiple loans to repay previous debt. But when political expediency is far-removed from economic reality, disaster is the only outcome.