THE SHAKTI PRINCIPALS
MEENAKSHI PRUSTY 56 MANSI 56 JOYMINI DEVI 45 SHG LEADERS IN ODISHA
Meenakshi Prusty, 56, from Gop in Puri, Odisha, designs and makes jute bags, folders and other items. Starting with Rs 250 from her piggy-bank, she’s now a successful businesswoman earning more than Rs 50 lakh a year. The woman who struggled for a meal for her family for most of the days is now the “mother goddess” to 120 needy women whom she employs on a monthly salary of Rs 5,000.
Married to a farmer, Meenakshi was struggling with two children and paralytic in-laws. Their income as farm labour was meagre. But she was not one to give up. One day in 1995, she broke her piggy bank and, with Rs 250, bought a sewing machine. She started stitching and altering clothes, but earned just Rs 20 or 30 a month.
In 2001, when the self-help group (SHG) movement began in Odisha and the Woman and Child Development (WCD) department was looking for women below the poverty line willing to work, Meenakshi was a natural choice. She was asked to train 10 women in
sewing and tailoring work every month. With a remuneration of Rs 20 from each student, she was carrying home a monthly salary of Rs 200. A working capital of Rs 5,000 as loan from the government came in handy and in 2005 her Bhagawati SHG was sanctioned a loan of Rs 2.5 lakh by the WCD department through its women empowerment wing, Mission Shakti. “We got a chance to attend the Bhubaneswar Sisir Saras (a rural marketing platform of the state government). Such was the demand for our work— jute bags and Pipli work— that we carried our sewing machine to the fair and sewed all night. Our SHG made 20 per cent profit,” she says.
Over the years, Bhagawati SHG has grown, moved from a one-room strawthatched room to a concrete twostoreyed building, which functions as a factory-cum-sewing training centre. Meenakshi supplied 1,000 tussar folders at the ‘Make in Odisha’ conclave.
Her daughter, Mansi, studied fashion designing in Bhubaneswar, but left her lucrative job at an export company in Indore to come back home and help the local women. The big break came in 2010 when Mansi made a whopping business from seed money of Rs 5,000. Today, her SHG earns revenue of Rs 3 lakh month. And Mansi has 60 women working under her.
Like Meenakshi, Joymini Devi, 45, who starved alternate days to save ration for kids, now works at the Take Home Rationing SHG. The SHG supplies the chhaatu and sooji mix to 287 anganwadi centres and earns
Rs 40-50 lakh a year. Under Mission Shakti, the state government has empowered 7 million women and 600,000 SHGs. The government is also giving Rs 25 lakh as one-time grant to block-level federations (clusters of SHG into similar trade) to develop and expand.
“Twenty years ago, I did not know much about life. Today, I’m well aware what being alive means. I know of my rights, economic as well as social. And in the process of learning things, I have started learning about myself ”—Meenakshi Prusty
Activist entrepreneurs who see rural welfare as profit