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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

No hic hic in this village now, hurrah by Santosh K Kiro

A band of tribal women from rebel-hit Jehan village, 125km from the state capital, are keeping their men off liquor since the past one-and-half years.

An unlikely crusader leads rural homemakers, numbering about 60, under the self-named outfit Nehru Mahila Samiti. She’s a 29-year-old primary schoolteacher, Basanti Tirkey, a Ranchi’s Nirmala College alumnus from the batch of 2004. The mother of a three-year-old son, her husband Antonis Lakra works in the gram panchayat.

The samiti, formed in early 2010, has done what many Alcoholics Anonymous or similar outfits world-wide haven’t managed to do. It has stopped the men of Jehan in Bishunpur block, Gumla district, from drinking at all. Perennially drunken men did not just disrupt family peace, they also hampered the economic development of the village.

On Saturday, The Telegraph caught up with the women at a function organised by NGO Vikash Bharati Bishunpur, in which social welfare minister Bimla Pradhan and Jharkhand’s First Lady Meera Munda added the celebrity quotient.

But the village women were the real stars.

Before the samiti got into the “keep sober” act, men, young and old, kept drinking everyday, spawning a generation that stayed on the wagon and off work. Women didn’t know how to stop them. Rice beer and mahua liquor were kitchen staples, brewed at almost every household of the village with a population of 500-odd.

What Basanti, a teacher at Hope Primary School in Salgi Budhia, and her band of sisters did was just stop this practice. Brewing of liquor was off limits at home. Women — wives, sisters, mothers — calmly told the men that they didn’t want liquor at home. Nor did they want their men to drink outside.

But the first step — more of a hurdle — was that the women had to be persuaded to speak up. “It was very tough,” recalled Basanti, the original firebrand.

“In December 2009, when I called a meeting of women to discuss this problem, I couldn’t convince anybody,” she said.

But Basanti persevered. In about three or four months, the women started responding to their call.

“In April 2010, we issued a whip that whoever makes rice beer or mahua at home would be fined Rs 5,000. Whoever drinks would be fined Rs 1,000. It actually worked,” said Tirkey.

The ripple effect spread from Jehan to neighbouring villages Koenartoli and Helta, too, as more women joined the campaign.

Men, sober for the first time in their lives, started searching for work. Agriculture started again. “We genuinely feel our women have done us a good turn,” said Jehan resident Ranthu Oraon, who hasn’t touched alcohol for a year.

Now, women of the samiti, who started collected Rs 5 every week from every member and gradually increased it to Rs 50, have Rs 75,000 in their kitty as working capital to generate livelihood avenues. “We tried pickle making. Now, we want to go in for goat-rearing, poultry and others,” said Basanti.