BANKING ON WOMEN
It was in February 1990 that Lakhimi Baruah, an employee in a state-owned cooperative bank, happened to read an article about an all-women cooperative bank in Surat. The fact that such a bank existed encouraged Baruah to work towards realising a dream she had been nurturing for years.
In her career, she met underprivileged women, most of them illiterate, often clueless about bank procedures and with personal issues they could not share with male employees working the counters. “A woman abandoned by her husband did not know what to write in the place of husband while filling the form. These women needed handholding on how to utilise that money,” she says.
Though many of these women were engaged in some income-generation activities, they had zero financial literacy and were often exploited by family members or middlemen. Baruah had also been actively involved in Dakshin Sarbaibandha Cooperative society since 1983, which worked to provide education among tea garden workers, legal help to women abandoned by their husbands or families, marriage counselling, spreading awareness about family planning and even fixing local issues of water supply and roads. This experience had convinced Baruah that a separate movement for economic empowerment of underprivileged women was required.
Within two weeks of reading that article, Baruah wrote to the RBI and after eight long years of paperwork, finally got permission to start the bank in 1998. What started with Rs 8,45,000 and 1,500 shareholders—90 per cent of whom were from BPL backgrounds—the bank today has a working capital of Rs 14 crore. It has four branches in three districts—Jorhat, Golaghat and Sivasagar—catering to 43,000 customers. What’s most encouraging is that though 75 per cent of the bank’s customers are illiterate, the NPA is less than 4 per cent of the total loans offered. Baruah believes the bank’s job is not just to help women open accounts or take loans, the 21 employees of the bank have also been trained to educate the customers on how to utilise the money, avail of government schemes and exercise their legal rights.
Baruah feels that the government must do more to provide an encouraging economic environment. “I don’t know why they charge 30 per cent income tax rate on a bank like this. And the state government doesn’t do any transaction through us though we run several government welfare schemes,” she says. But that may be the price of her determination to keep politicians away. “You never know when political patronage becomes political interference.” ■
“THESE UNDERPRIVILEGED WOMEN NEEDED HAND-HOLDING ON HOW TO USE THEIR MONEY”