This is regarding the collective action which I observed during our fieldwork. We went to ushegaon village of adilabad district. About 7 years back in the whole village decided to construct a temple where an old statue of Lord Hanuman was situated. Being a poor tribal village this was almost a dream. But under the leadership of two people Surebhan and Manik Rao, this dream is close to coming true. It was decided that all families in the village will pay an amount of 1 rupee per week. Even this was not compulsory. But the families paid this amount regularly.
When this amount reached an amount of 5000, Surebham and Manik rao went to open an account in the bank, but the bank manager refused to open an account. Not getting disappointed they came up with an idea of rotating the money in form of giving loans to the people of the village at lower interests than the moneylenders. This had a dual advantage, the amount was increasing and the people were getting benifitted. Today except two families out of the 104 families no one depends on money lenders and the best part is that the total amount has reaches 5 lakhs. The work on temple is going to start in February this year. Thus is a clear illustration of what wonders a simple collective action can do.
4 comments:
Money is colleccted for consrtuction of temple and it is lent to the people at lower interest rate. It is good that villagers are benefitted by this. But what I think by not starting the constuction of the temple though the money has reached the amount of 5 lakh rupees, they have digressed from the main purpose. To mantain the interest of constructing the temple money should be collected from the villagers regularly but there is no information whether now money is collected from the villagers or not.
i can understand the perspective in which you are talking about and the benefits which the villagers derived from this. but what happened to the original purpose of the temple construction. isn't it a case of byproduct is becoming larger than the original product.
This is in response to Saurabhs comment. I dont think here the byproduct is larger than the original product. The main aim is to still construct the temple.But it was decided that they will start the construction only after a certain amount is reached. instead of keeping the cash with them they started rotating it. and because of this rotation of money the total amount has increased. aa the amount now has reached a considerable amount they are starting the work.
This comment is in response to Parkhit's comment. As a major part of your queries would have been answered as saurabh also had a similar doubt. Now coming to the second part of your question the money collection of one rupee per family per week will continue and will be used to give loans within the village.
Thanks
Post a Comment