How Women Farmers In Maharashtra Have Turn Their Village Into ¡®No Suicide Zone¡¯ Despite Drought

It's just past noon and all the men in this tiny village of about 3,000 are busy with household chores. Vishnu Kumbhar is cleaning the poultry yard while Achyut Katkate is sieving soybean. Other men in the neighbourhood are looking after the children. The women are conspicuous by their absence. Clearly, this is not a typical village scene.

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Katkate clears the mystery. "The women have gone to Osmanabad town to pay their instalments to the banks and self-help groups. They will also visit the market to buy supplies for their businesses and shops," he reveals. Talking of his wife Komaltai, he says with pride, "She is the leader, and I am her follower."

Komaltai and many other unassuming women in the village are responsible for a financial revolution. They have developed a sustainable model to tackle the perennial agricultural crisis in the region. So successful is their model that, despite repeated drought and crop failure, no farmer from this village has committed suicide.

Their success has driven the village moneylender out of business. In fact, he is looking for financial assistance from the women farmer-entrepreneurs, who now control the finances of their own families and of the village.

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What drives these women is the need to take care of their own. Rekha Shinde, a farmer, says, "Rain deficit and drought are permanent here... A few years ago, the rising number of farmer suicides in the region had got us worried. So we came together to save our families and children. First, we decided to take care of the basic needs."

Rekha says the first step was to make sure that in case a farmer committed suicide, his family and children would not starve. "We asked our men to give us a small piece of land. But they said women must work at home and not in the fields," she recalls. However, the women kept asking the men for land till they relented. The women then started growing vegetables together. With limited water, resources and help, they grew enough for their families and also managed to make some profit by selling the surplus vegetables.

"This experiment gave confidence to us and our family members," Rekha says.

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Next, the women went to Osmanabad to seek information about government schemes. "The government babus were unwilling to give us any information and assist us. We then started visiting them in groups... We were determined to bring all aid and schemes to the village," says Manjushree Kshirsagar, another farmer. Today, the village has over 200 self-help groups with 265 women as members. "The turnover of all the women's groups put together in our village is over Rs1 crore," says Komaltai.

"With the assistance of self-help groups, the village women have started poultry farms, goat rearing, dairy business, cloth shops, sewing business and beauty parlours," says Kamal Kumbhar. She won the CII Foundation Women Exemplar Award 2017 in the field of microenterprise, as well as the Niti Ayog's award. But Kamal is not the only entrepreneur-cum-farmer in the village.

"There is an unwritten rule in the village: Every purchase must be made in the village and the money must not go out," says Rekha.