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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Change in Jangalmahal: Bengal’s girls find new reasons to study -Sarah Hafeez
-The Indian Express

Mamata has been declaring scheme after scheme, including free bicycles and shoes to girls in Jangalmahal. At least 1,04,000 adivasi girls were given cycles until last year, says the TMC election manifesto.

Raipur/ Salbani: Sipra Das, 19, is the first in her family to go to college. A grant of Rs 25,000 under the Kanyashree Prakalpa scheme will not only cover her fees but also help pay for coaching.

“My sister Tumpa, who is 28, had to drop out to look after my brother and me while our parents worked the fields. But I want to study,” said Sipra, who is in her first year at PRMS College in Raipur of Jangalmahal, a hotbed of Maoist activity until 2011.

Mamata Banerjee’s Kanyashree Prakalpa, launched in 2013, is one of the most visible tools of women’s empowerment in rural Bengal. It has benefited 26 lakh girls whose parents earn Rs 10,000 or less a month. With government records showing attendance of adolescent girls in school at just 33 per cent, the scheme is aimed at “ensuring girls stay in school and delay marriage till at least age 18”.

Md Salim, CPM MP from Raiganj, dismissed what the government calls an achievement. “Bengal has the highest crime rate against women according to the NCRB and the lowest rate of conviction,” Salim said. “The Rs 25,000 grant is political patronage, not a form of empowerment, because young women feel so insecure in the state.”

The ‘Ma’ of ‘Ma, Mati, Manush’ was central to the Trinamool Congress’s ascent to power. Women, especially adivasis, were at the forefront of the Lalgarh, Singur and Nandigram agitations that eventually brought down the 34-year Left government. And there were more women voters than men in the assembly elections of 2011 and the Lok Sabha elections of 2014, especially in Jangalmahal, the Election Commission said.

Mamata has been declaring scheme after scheme, including free bicycles and shoes to girls in Jangalmahal. At least 1,04,000 adivasi girls were given cycles until last year, says the Trinamool Congress election manifesto. The state has 20 lakh first-time voters, roughly 3 per cent of the electorate.

“Maoist activities had hit education the most. But government programmes have now been motivating children, especially girls, to join school,” said Sukumar Hansda, Trinamool MLA from Jhargram.

“Dropouts have reduced drastically,” said Sabita Duari, who teaches in a government school in Salbani, West Medinipur. “Students are more regular for they can cycle to school.”

The flip side

The administrative mechanism that the current government follows, however, has meant that not all benefits reach the targets.

“Mamata Banerjee has bypassed the panchayat institution almost completely,” said political theorist Partha Chatterjee. “Under the Left Front, institutional benefits were distributed through the panchayat and power was taken from the bureaucracy and given to elected individuals. Mamata has reversed the order. Now there is a control mechanism that goes from the BDO’s office to the CMO’s office directly.”

As such, not one woman signed up after Mamata called on self-help groups to run 65 ration shops in West Medinipur, Bankura, and Purulia in November 2012. Several women told The Indian Express they knew nothing about it. “We were never told about this,” said Chandana Karmakar, pradhan for Matgoda gram panchayat in Raipur.

Self-help groups had been started by the Left in 1983, with hundreds of cooperatives supervising work under MNREGA, or drives to discourage dowry and alcoholism. They now have only small banking options to handle. “We don’t do much nowadays especially because resource persons, our guides from the panchayat office, have stopped visiting us,” said Suchitra Mahato, member of an SHG in West Medinipur’s Jambeda village.

“The panchayats and the SHGs were strong frontal party organisations of the Left Front in rural Bengal, something which Mamata does not want to strengthen,” said Dr Prabhat Dutta, former professor of public administration at University of Calcutta and a researcher on SHG in West Bengal. “It seems Mamata has not been able to mobilise women institutionally these five years.”

This series is being written under the aegis of the Inclusive Media-UNDP Fellowship, 2015