A photo-essay on rural Microfinance and Microenterprise in Rajasthan

It is getting to the end of the monsoons here in Alwar, which means the temperature of the air is just right, the sky a bright shimmering pale blue with giant cumulus clouds floating about. There is a slight smell of wood-smoke in the air, a smell that will probably stick with me and remind me of my time here. Alwar distict is not distinctly Rajasthan. Its proximity to Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradhesh has shaped a Mevati identity which seems to have absorbed several regional identities into one. Probably a little more time here and I could possibly make sense of this identity but for now I am here in the village of Akbarpur taking notes in my note pad.

I am sitting under a khejri tree (Prosopis Cineraria), revered for its shade and fodder in this region. Perched on its branches, in the early afternoon one might see a common hoopie, or rather hear it. Behind me the 23 women of Akbarpur Self Help Group meet for their fortnightly meeting. The women inside of the mud walled room are filled with a new found sense of empowerment: through their small self help co-operative they have successfully found a voice and a hand to change the society they live in and with that they have earned a reason to be proud.

[Every fortnight the members of the self help group, money is collected from each member (usually 10 Rs from each member) which is adds to the corpus. Once the corpus is large enough NABARD gives out loans to members on the upto ten times the strength of the corpus. Loans are paid back at 8 percent rate of interest.]

The women of the village are part of novel scheme - the women in the picture have formed a self help microcredit group so that they can have a greater say in the welfare of their community. They meet every fortnight and collect money from each of their members on which they give out small loans - for a new buffallo or a water-pump, etc. In the 2 years the thirty or so women of this tiny village on the Alwar - Jaipur highway has a corpus of over 200,000 rupees (4500 USD)

[The group of women from the Mevat District in neighboring Haryana have driven all the way to Akbarpur to learn how to form a self help group of their own from the women at Akbarpura. For the next hour or so they had a long discussion on the mechanics of microfinancing, on how money should be saved, how loans should be dispensed, how to deal with defaulters etc. I felt I might has well have been in an office conference room in Bombay listening to suit clad MBAs rather than in village in rural rajastan in the company of very smart women in their colourful salwars.]

Microcredit—lending small sums to poor people to set up or expand small businesses—is an effective way to alleviate poverty. The poor cannot usually borrow from commercial banks, because they lack collateral. Loan sharks lend without security, but often at interest rates of 10-20% a day. Small time retailers who borrow from money lenders to buy a day’s stock often have to hand over most of their profits. Failure to repay can result in broken legs.

[Since women are the sole-stakeholders in many microcredit schemes it also sometimes leads to their economic independence and hence social empowerment - which is doubly important in places like Alwar which has an otherwise dismal record at sex equality.]

Microlenders try to satisfy the poor people’s need for credit less brutally. Since the 1970s, organizations, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and Accion International in Latin America, have encouraged poor borrowers to form groups to cross-guarantee each other’s loans. In the Grameen model, one of a group of rural women takes out a microscopic loan, often as little as $25, to start a business. Only when she repays it can the next woman in the group borrow. Peer pressure makes sure that default rates are minimal.

[Source : The Economist]


[Microcredit works better than handouts for two reasons. First, it fosters enterprise rather than dependency. Second, a well-run microcredit scheme can be self-sustaining. Repayment rates of over 98% are common.]

[Zarina Begum's tea stall micro enterprise. READ BELOW ]

The business plans backed by micro financiers tend to be breathtakingly simple. Take Zaina Begum, a successful micro-entrepreneur in Akbarpura. Zaina runs a tiny chai stand by the Alwar-Jaipur highway usually catering to truckers and villager alike. The place cost almost nothing to build: roughly-hewn bamboo props up a ceiling of thatch and old dustbin liners and there are no walls to speak of. The menu is unpretentious. “We only serve chai and biscuits,” she says. By taking out a series of small loans from her local Self help group (SHG) and the NABARD Zaina was able to source her tea wholesale rather than retail. She now employs three people, has repaid most of her loans, and swaggers around town on a second-hand Luna.

If micro-insurance can be made to work, the Internet will ensure that the idea is swiftly copied which makes you think that globalisation is not just for the rich.

If you have 25$s and paypall account you too could become a global financier through KIVA, an internet service that allows you to finance unique small businesses in the developing world.

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UPDATE:

I won !

Trivial Matters is now officially.

The


Thank you to all the 171 of you who voted for me in the category and other categories (Travel and Design) were I lost to far more worthy competition.



It makes me extremely happy to announce that I have been nominated in 3 categories (Photoblog, Travel & Design) at the Indibloggies 2006 bettering my 1 nomination in 2005 (Design). Firstly, thank you guys for nominating me and if you've got the sudden overpowering urge to vote for me PLEASE do so here.



Thank you again. Also if you stay in Mumbai please do buy a copy of the Hindustan Times tomorrow (Thursday) - I promise you'll be pleasantly surprised.



Update :

If you, like Twilight Fairy are wondering what the pleasent suprise I was referring to yesterday is ? Well, HT published a photoessay of mine today and it looks something like this.
You can read my Orissa posts here, here and images here.


UPDATE

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Butterflies swooped and swirled above us. I leaned out over the moss casement stones of a former Portuguese fort and watched as the creatures -- mere silhouettes -- danced in the early spring dusk.

''They are bats, not butterflies,'' my friend R.W, announced.

Of course, bats. Situated in an austere hilltop fortress, that over the centuries has withstood many invasions and much political intrigue, the Castelo de Korlai seems an ideal place for a few bats. Stone seals from that time are still standing, but the etchings have eroded and are less defined; and the remains of the fortress walls are coated with moss. Silence rings through the waist high weeds-green, dense and prickly. I get entangled in the vegetation and yet I walk forward. Thorns pierce through my socks as I brush off the pollen. A rash breaks out as my arms glow red. I know scratching will not help but do not fight the stimuli. I have realized that in nature’s eye humans are an invasive species. A bulbul watches us from her ivory tower in the mango tree laughing at our endeavor to pierce the wall of green. Here we are on a ruined Portuguese fort on a hill, surrounded by the Arabian Sea on three sides. It is a place fit for a water colour painting. If the scene was not picturesque enough there is a lighthouse in the foreground added for good measure.


[The lighthose and fort of Korlai. The lighthouse keeper will give you a tour of the place for a mere 5 rupees.]



You would be surprised to hear that I am not in Korlai for the views or even the crisp Arabian Sea breeze. I am in Korlai, in a search for haunted forts, fallen churches and a lost Portuguese Creole soon to disappear. A short bumpy drive south of Alibaug, past the green glades of Revdanda and just before the Casuarina ridden beach of Kashid lies the quiet village of Korlai. A small community of a less than a thousand people in Korlai still speaks a language unique to them and different from any other language spoken in all of Maharashtra. It is a Portuguese Creole called Kristi that the locals refer to as No Ling, meaning our language. Through colonial expansion in Asia, Portuguese spread as the language of trade, which is how the language developed in the area. The Portuguese left the area in 1740, after which there has been little contact between the local community and Portugal. Yet the language has continued nearly three centuries on due to the relative degree of cultural isolation faced by the village. For many years Korlai and its Christian inhabitants, were relatively isolated from the Marathi-speaking Hindus and Muslims surrounding them. Since 1986, there is a bridge across the Kunkalika River, and the place has become more accessible and with it the more dominant languages such as Marathi and Hindi are increasingly being adopted. Like in Daman and Diu where a similar Portuguese Creole was once spoken, the unique Creole of Korlai is slowly fading away.

During the three days I spent in Korlai last weekend, I often felt as if I were walking around in a historical preserve, not a village. Or in an Indiana Jones movie or in frontier town of some faraway colonial outpost. I decided to let my feet lead me through the sepia-toned side streets of Korlai in search for this disappearing language. Having no prior experience at this sort of thing I decided to wander around hoping to chance upon the language and the light eyed people who speak it.

The streets were gray and of concrete, the homes were of brick and cement, and both were built on a narrow strip of land that expanded more and more until it suddenly curved and ended at the sea. Crosses punctuated every street corner. Old ladies in nine yard sarees oiled their hair, while children chased piglets and men sat cross-legged at porches tugging on beedis.



I smiled and walked on before I piqued one man’s attention enough for him to launch into a question. “Bon dee-ah”, he said before changing over to Marathi and asking me where I came from. Bon dee-ah I repeated as I smiled. There it was the simplest example of Portuguese where you least expect it with a dash of Marathi. I wanted to hear more of this strange pidgin so I was directed to the church and told to ask for a woman named Celestine. She will sing you a song I was promised, so we trudged along. Celestine was a cheerful old lady dressed in a purple sari. She looked well into the eighties but had an infectious demeanor of someone in her twenties and when we asked her to sing for us she was only happy to oblige.



She sat us down just in front of the altar of Korlai’s old church and picked up a worn out looking note book from one of the drawers. As we settled down on one of the creaky benches of this old church she began to sing. In an aging baritone words curled out with a beautiful melody. This was the song of Korlai, a song in ancient Kristi.

“Maldita Maria Madulena,
Maldita firmosa,
Ai, contra ma ja foi a Madulena,
Vastida de mata!”

Which when loosely translated into English means :

Cursed Maria Madalena,
Cursed Beautiful one,
Oh, against my will it was Madalena,
Dressed in leaves and branches!

This was a haunting song about Maria Madelena; the song just like the language it was sung in are mere Ghosts of Portugal in Maharashtra soon to disappear.


* Published in the Hindustan Times, 1 February, 2007

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Busybee once said "The best fish, chicken, mutton and vegetarian thalis are at Soul Fry"

Unfortunately for Mr. Contractor he isn't here with us for the fabulous Open Blog meet Mel and Sakshi have thrown open with sparkle of words and graphics.

From previous experience you could expect Amit , Saket , Gaurav, Manish , Shiju , Melody , Sakshi , Ideasmith , Divya , eM and obviously me amongst others.


Mel's fab poster will provide you all the info



Confirm you presence here

And Yeah Spread the word !

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The nice people at Hindustan Times asked me to do this (& this). They tell me it could be a weekly thing - I'm happy.

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[The flags and colours of an Armada of Fishing boats docked at Ferry Wharf. I hope this image gives the sense of the exhilerating energy of the place]

Ferry Warf, Mazgaon, is a daring mix of the bright colours of the machiwalli’s saris, dried salted fish, and the flowing melt of sea-scented blocks of ice. It smells of diesel exhaust and fish guts. The visuals are of glistening pomfret and smoldering beedis; drying bombils and piles of prawns; of turbulence in the Arabian Sea, and the squid-ink backwaters; and the air fills with crude fish-talk Marathi that end with profanities chewed up and spat into the mucky sea like the red gutka (chewing tobacco) that stains the city walls.


[The wholesale fish market at Ferry Warf may not be as large and organized as the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo or well known as the Fulton Market in New York but what it lacks in size and notoriety it makes up in colour and uniqueness. One difference is that almost all the fish at the market is fresh sourced directly from line of fishing boats docked at the wharf. Good place to hunt for fresh ravas, pomfret and bombil.]


[A basket of prawns changes hands at Ferry Wharf. With a few exceptions women for various social reasons do not actively participate in the process of commerce in India. Fish retail is one of the welcome exceptions to this rule, the machiwallis constitute a large portion of the buyers at the wholesale market.]

Dawn is imminent and the air is brisk and saturated with the unsavory fragrance of fish. The Warf seethes with buyers, sellers and fiery machiwallis (fisher women) in their signature saris, weaving through a crowd, balancing baskets laden with iced-down fish, shouting or whistling warnings, shoving and pushing those they are overtaking. The wharf, each morning witnesses an unimaginable buzz of activity. An entire fleet of fishing boats lines the pier, as fish is slowly unloaded, only to be sold to the highest bidder a few minutes later.


[Fresh fish being unloaded]


[A rose tinted sky hangs over the Arabian Sea as sun rises over a very busy Ferry Wharf]

A torrent of transactions wrings sweat from the auctioneers at Ferry Wharf, who provide Mumbai almost all of its supply of fresh fish. A single supplier sells almost two hundred fish an hour, or about one every three minutes. The muqabla begins with loud shouting accompanied by swift movement of hands as the players in this mercantile theatre decide their price. At the low points they talk politely haggling over the price till they are consumed with emotion and they pout and shout at each other clutching their dhotis; the fish are waved and thrown up in the air to prove quality and freshness – yet the shouting match continues, up a notch to a new level of aggression. Sometimes it gives way to gentle shoving and pushing accompanied by more shouting and at times loud abuse from the buyer, “Have you gone crazy, six hundred rupees for such a small pomfret? How do you expect me to sell at such prices?” But just as you feel they are going to be at each others throats a compromise is reached, a price is agreed and there are smiles all around. The porters load the fish and its time for the next Muqabla.


[A young fisherwomen carries her purchases for day back to her transport.]


[A fisherwoman hawks her catch of crabs. You have got to love her colour sense.]


[Not all the fish at ferry wharf is fresh as you can see. Women sell dried and salted bombil (Bombay Duck) and shrimp]






[Fish being loaded on to a cab - which will probably find itself on the counters of a fish market somewhere in Bombay]

You can find rest of the picture here.

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I turned to photography because I’m a lazy writer. And so it should be immediately noted that the imagery I typically sew together is meticulous, structurally obsessive, random and doesn’t necessarily concern itself with any sort of palpable beauty. I shoot photographs because I want to tell stories, just like some of my fellow bloggers do with words. While some may find that difficult to do in one frame, it’s all the more rewarding (for me, of course) when all the pieces fit together and transcend the petty limitations of four corners.

Here’s the story of how it all began. I started this blog some 3 1/2 years ago, as a bored seventeen year old, after I somehow stumbled on to a blog, then owned by Pyra labs. For the first two years amazingly I didn’t quiet know what to do with the blog so I filled the pages with something that read like del.icio.us meets livejournal. It was only then that I discovered flickr and photography – probably about the same time. Now non-structured grammatically incorrect gibberish doesn’t find many takers on the blogosphere so I had to restructure my blog to make it more accessible; after all what’s the use of blogging if there is no one at the end reading it. Pictures are a good substitute - firstly, I can by-pass all the inadequacies I have with words and spelling and secondly, if all else fails I’ll get a comment,” Nice pictures, Akshay”.
“Tell stories with photographs” – that’s been my objective for the last 18 months or so and hopefully that’s come across through my blog.

Another advantage of populating your blog with pictures is that come year end you know exactly what you’ve been up to throughout the year. Let us take a look.

January


A sabjiwalli at Byculla market, which was Bombay's muncipal vegetable market but then Bombay became Mumbai and they shifted the market wisely to Navi Mumbai [Vashi].You can still find the freshest and cheapest vegetables at Byculla. A picture I took roaming the streets of Byculla.


Top left: Bhaigan ka bhurta [mashed brinjal cooked on an open flame],Bottom Right: Rajma ,Cente: Dal fry, Raita and an Aloo [potato] and Mulli[radish] Paratha [stuffed bread]. Not in picture: 2 Salted Lassis and hot pulkas/rotis. All part of a meal I enjoyed at Crystals, go read about it.


A fortune telling robot tells does more than tell me my future.


Fishermen on Sewri Jetty on a Sunday Morning. I place the camera on the concrete for this shot, directly at the Sun.

I love playing word association and if you shout Sewree at me the first words that would come into my mind are 'trucks' & 'pollution'. Sewri is not place I especially like. The question then arises why am I on the Harbour Line train bound for Sewree ? The answer to that is - Flamingos among other things.


February


Silhouette of Hugo at the ruined Alter of the Franciscan church of Santo Antonio taken in Bassein, Vasai which possibly is Mumbai's only piece of the Renaissance.



Go to Gateway of India or any tourist attraction in Indian and these basuri-wallahs [flute players] are a dime a dozen but what made me take this picture was the visual art in the forefront - gives it a cool effect. By the way the basuri wallah picture asked me to mention his name which is ‘Haidut’ incidently. A picture I took for a series of post I did on the Kala Ghoda Art Festival for the KGAF blog.



March


Shouting "Jeoorge Bussh Murdabad," breaking into "Gulli Gulli meh shoor hai Jeoorge Bussh Oil Chor hai" at the Anti-Bush protests in Azad Maidan.


Zareeq, works cutting old discarded plastic on a rusting cutting machine in Dharavi's 13th Compound.

It is hard to find an idle soul in Dharavi, it is a cesspool of activity, buzzing with energy and ingenuity, always fighting, always dreaming and looking to the future. It is then that I realised that the only idle soul in Dharavi was me.



April


"Dam-damachak", a road side Busker in the Old Pune quater of Budhwar Peth.

Old Pune to me is where time stops but the traffic does not, is where the people return your smiles and the decaying wooden facades are not just gateways but time machines into an India of the past. Sadly heritage structures are the number one casualty in the growing concretization of the city. Many such remnants of the Pune's rich past are slowly disappearing.


A Versova Morning.



May



Srinagar Relfects on the Dal Lake.

This is what our driver. Shakeel must have meant when he told us, "Kal dekhna, aap Jannat mai uthen gai" [Tomorrow morning you will wake up in paradise] . This was not the Srinagar we read about in the papers or see on the news channels. This is not the Srinagar of curfews and bandhs, of grenade attacks, of bomb blasts, of shoot outs, of encounters, of security checkpoints and bunkers, of armed men in uniform, of abandoned buildings, of sniffer dogs, of military convoys, of lurking fear and of 6000 missing young men. Sadly natural beauty is indifferent to the human suffering.

Posts on Kashmir here, here and here



Fisherman on the Dal


Mumbaiya Guide to beat the Summer.



June


Floating Gardens of the Nagin

The Nagin lake is a peaceful cleaner smaller cousin of the Dall Lake in Srinagar is an unforgettable experience - is not only extremely relaxing but offers a close look at the almost amphibian life of the Hanjis, the boat people.


July



Foaming Tides in Orissa

Even if Puri was not a temple town steeped in history it would have survived for its stretches of golden sand, crusty waves lashing the shore and an unblemished skyline that greets you warmly. The beach, which is lined with local women selling an array of crystal and shell
jewellery and fishermen displaying their catch of shiny fish and glistening prawns, is a whirl of activity. The conical hatted local young men who double as lifeguards are as much a part of the beach as the surf and the sand and are a safe bet against the treacherous undercurrent.


The Gods Roll On

The grand spectacle of the chariot festival of the god Jagannath of Orissa has been played out on the streets of this ancient seaside town of Puri for more than six hundred years. Each summer hundreds of thousands of devotees travel here to offer darshan, a ritual gazing, before the three grand chariots, the largest bearing the
timber image of Jagannath, and to labour on the thigh-thick ropes that pull the rodigious vehicles, through the streets of Puri.



August


Saira Likes to Draw, part of series of posts I did while volunteering at a girls Taleemshala in the Mevat Block of Alwar District Rajasthan.

Take Saira for example. Saira likes to draw, an activity which her teacher encourages. Give Saira a sketching pad and a set of crayons and her talent will soon become apparent to you. She fills up the virgin pages of her note book with scenes of everyday Chandolli life. Here is a pencil drawing of a buffalo soaking itself in a pond in front of the school - it was all very recognizable - and here is a picture of turbaned man chasing off a donkey (or a dog I'm not quite sure). And on this page is a picture of a shop, a small baniya ki dukaan, with things in front of it which could have been a sack of spices or perhaps people sitting down one could not tell - but as I said before they are excellent sketches and deserved their status of being pinned up on the walls of the classroom.


Relax ! Have A Char Minar

As our auto-rickshaw speeds across Hyderabad encountering only scanty Sunday morning traffic, the skyline changes slowly from ugly rectangular concrete blocks to that of white domes and minarets. The city sprawls among the smoothly sculptured rocks of the deccan plateau and straddles the Musi River. The change is only complete when you cross the Musi and you find yourself in one of the best bazaars in Asia, Hyderabad's ancient commercial center. At its heart is the Char Minar, a magnificent 400-year-old granite arch with four soaring minarets and wide arches opening out on all four directions.



September


A Potter of Kumbharwada, Dharavi.

Kumbharwada, where a community of potters has been staying for many generations, is emblematic of the pressures on livelihood in Dharavi,Mumbai. The Kumbhars, a community of potters from Saurashtra in Gujarat, were first relocated here from South Bombay in 1932 (after two previous relocations, always to the northern edge of the city as it was defined at the time). They found a swampy, uninhabited district with plenty of space for their kilns and houses


October


Back Stage with the gods, Ram Lila at Cross Maidan.

Thirty minutes to "curtain rise" and Hanuman is still to attach his eyebrows and his tail has gone missing since the last performance; Ram can't find his right jhumka, Sita is straightening her [his actually as all Ramlila artists are men] blouse; Laxman is fiddling with Ram's bow and Ravana still not ready can be seen alternating between sips of a cup of chai and a beedi he borrowed from Sita. In other words it was all a messed up surreal dream exactly like the one I had about Jesus riding a Harley.


Phew !!! That pretty much concludes my year in Pictures. It's been an eventful year and I hope 2007 is as eventful. Happy Holidays and Thank you
for reading.