Self Help Groups and Social Capital

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Geographical Research • September 2006 • 44(3):285–295doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2006.00390.x

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.

Constructing Social Capital: Self-Help Groups and

Rural Women’s Development in India

KUNTALA LAHIRI-DUTT1* and GOPA SAMANTA2

1Resource Management in the Asia Pacific Program, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia.2Mankar College, West Bengal, India.*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Received 24 September 2003; Revised 24 January 2006; Accepted 30 January 2006

AbstractThe success of the group approach in rural micro-finance among women hasinspired the tendency to look at all networking as essentially good and desirablein rural community development, without acknowledging the entrenchedcaste, class, ethnic and religious hierarchies that lead to diversities amongwomen. Government schemes designed for poverty alleviation among ruralwomen tend to be influenced by concepts and models that have been successfulelsewhere, but do not take into account the diversities of situations at the locallevel. Internationally popular catchwords are used indiscriminately withoutquestioning how these concepts can work effectively in the specific local con-text. This paper examines why some ‘self-help groups’ fail by using the Devel-

opment of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) experience in India.The empirical survey was done over a period of two years in Burdwan, a rela-tively rich agricultural tract located in eastern India. We argue that whilst the‘group’ has inherent benefits, it must never be allowed to become the

paradigmin developmental policies for women.

KEY WORDS

group approach; women in rural India; gender and development;local context; women’s empowerment

ACRONYMSDRDA District Rural Development AuthorityDWCRA Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas

GAD Gender and DevelopmentICDS Integrated Child Development SchemeSGSY Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar YojanaSHG Self Help GroupWID Women in Development

Introduction: bowling together

The overwhelming success of the group appro-ach and ‘networking’ in rural women’s develop-ment has turned them into dominant paradigms

used indiscriminately in development circles,irrespective of the local context. This is a ‘toogood to be true’ story, leading to a widespread

and formulaic application of the group approachin most government policies and schemes aimedat developmental interventions, especially thosemeant for rural poor women in less developed

countries. This paper examines the reasons for the failure of self-help groups (SHGs) under theDevelopment of Women and Children in Rural



286 Geographical Research • September 2006 • 44(3):285–295

© 2006 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2006 Institute of Australian Geographers

Areas (DWCRA) scheme popularised by theGovernment of India for micro-financing income-generating activities for rural women.

The objectives of this paper are to examinethe factors underlying the failure of self-help

groups in the DWCRA scheme, and by makinga critique of the indiscriminate use of thegroup approach in rural women’s developmentschemes, contribute to the current Gender andDevelopment debate relating to women’s eco-nomic citizenship. To elaborate our point, wehave chosen to use the micro-level context of Burdwan in the state of West Bengal in easternIndia, a relatively prosperous agricultural district.The study is based on District Rural Develop-ment Authority (DRDA) data, local officialstatistics, published census materials, inter-

views with government officials responsible for implementing the scheme and, above all, withthose rural women who are the putative bene-ficiaries of the scheme. Our previous experiencewith local groups in this region using participa-tory action research methods (see Lahiri-Duttand Samanta, 2002) informed this work, as didsome recent critiques of the static and reduc-tionist uses of the GAD approach critiquing thepersisting dualism of the donor-recipient binary(see Baden and Goetz, 1998; Koczberski, 1998;McIlwaine and Datta, 2003 for a general over-view of WID to GAD policies).

We interviewed individual women from bothsuccessful and failed groups in their homes. Inselecting our participants, there was no consciouseffort on our part to do ‘scientific sampling’;however, the resultant interviews can indeed bedescribed as a ‘sample’ of SHG members whowere interested in our research and were willingto participate in it. This, we believe, made itpossible for us to get the richest data, becauseof their interest in our research. Consequently,

we have tried to avoid generalisation in thispaper since our examinations of constructionsof social capital took place through open-endeddiscussions with no fixed set of questions.Casual conversations initially focused on routineeveryday chores at home and at work as well asperceptions of their work, following methodsdescribed by Garcia-Dungo (1999, 7) because of the important issue of getting access to researchparticipants, and following her instruction that‘the researcher should consistently flow withthe direction of the “talk” riding on what

people are conscious of at any moment of time’. Thus these discussions were free-flowing.These interviews were supported by repeated

meetings of very small focused discussiongroups of not more than 3–4 participants,organised in villages, and culminated in a finalmeeting in the neighbouring town. We haveused fictitious names in the paper to conceal

the identities of participants.

Civic engagement, networks andwomen’s development

The concept of cooperativisation, the basic build-ing block of Gandhian philosophy, has beenreinforced in recent years by the group approachin rural development schemes essentialised incontemporary concepts of social capital, civicengagement and networking in India. Widelyapplied now in rural women’s development schemes,the SHG is one operational expression of such

concepts. Yet, in specific locations certain self-help groups are characterised by their lacklustreperformance, rural Burdwan being one of them.Let us first outline the concepts that propelledthe SHG into the limelight in rural developmentschemes in India and elsewhere.

Gender disparity and discrimination areessential characteristics of rural society in India.The salient features of rural women’s margin-alisation are low levels of literacy, low purchas-ing power, poor health status, low participationrates in the formal economy, and low levels of empowerment in the family as well as in thesociety. However, although Indian society ischaracterised by multiple hierarchies, women,as a group or set of groups, are commonly seenas homogeneous; this makes development inter-ventions easy to operationalise. Consequently,criticisms of development policies for womenhave emerged: ‘contrary to the statements madeby the state officials, neither their views nor theinterests of grass roots women have been takeninto consideration at the time of policy formula-

tion’ (Rajagopal and Mathur, 2000, 2910).Similarly, ‘People have to be looked [at] as thefundamental resource and not as problems for whom planning is devised’ (Bandyopadhyay

et al.

, 2002, 2558). Group formation and net-working, following the example of poorer com-munities elsewhere in Bangladesh or in Africa,have been the hallmarks of micro-enterprisedevelopment amongst rural women in India(Beaumont et al

., 1992; Creevey, 1996). Thisexcessive emphasis on the group fails to recog-nise the various constraints on poor rural women

in specific contexts and cannot necessarily ensuretheir success in every rural context. Indeed, ithas been argued (Pretes, 2002), that the entire



K. Lahiri-Dutt and G. Samanta: Constructing Social Capital 287


focus in micro-financing rural development hasnow shifted to ‘micro-credit’ from aid or assist-ance such as the granting of start-up funds.Yet, it has been noted that whilst groups arefundamental to economic, social and political

outcomes, the chronically poor are usually dis-advantaged in group formation due to severalreasons including their lack of assets and rights(Thorp et al., 2003).

Uncritical acceptance of the group approachas one that generically empowers all women andmaterially improves their lives is a manifestationof a communitarian vision. Bauman (2001) hascriticised from a sociological point of view the‘feel good’ (p. 1) sense or ‘naive immersion inhuman togetherness’ (p. 10) that the word ‘com-munity’ conveys. The self-help groups are indeed

communities of purpose, but fail to take intoconsideration the plurality of issues within thecategory of ‘women’. Long ago, liberal feministsexpressed anxiety that the natural rights of individual women might become subsumed instrong ‘community schemes’ (Gutmann, 1985). Indeclaring the group approach as the only mode of poverty alleviation and empowerment, a similar discourse has been entrenched in GAD schemesin rural India. This discourse neglects to analysethe gender relations in which women are sub-ordinated, which, according to Kabeer (1994),must inform any effort to empower women(Moser, 1989).

Contemporary developmental literature is richwith instances of participation in, and engage-ment with, communal activities bringing peopleinto close contact. Beginning with Chambers’early work (Chambers, 1983), such participationand cooperation have now come to be regardedas essential to the accumulation of socialcapital1, captured through social relations byvirtue of actors’ connections enabling access to

resources in the networks or groups of whichthey are members. Human capital is a similar concept, the roots of which can be traced backto Adam Smith who included all the acquiredand useful abilities of the populations in acountry as part of capital. In the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries this notion occa-sionally resurfaced in the economic literaturebut according to Lin (2001) the contemporaryunderstanding of human capital can be attri-buted to the works of Johnson (1960), Schultz(1961) and Becker (1964; 1993). Bourdieu dis-

tinguished between cultural capital and socialcapital (1972/1977; 1983/1986), and Perez-Diaz (1993; 1995; 2002) differentiated between

civil and uncivil social capital. Whichever wayit is defined, social capital is generally con-sidered to be intrinsic to social functioning, inthat it enables the members of a society to actcollectively in solving their problems and work-

ing for their common good (Cox, 2002, 337).Members of a society, affected by each other’sactions and those of public authorities, developinterest in improving their situation by poolingresources and sharing costs, which is theessence of collective action (Garber, 1995). For poor people, support networks and sharingresources are seen as primary means of eco-nomic survival (Fowler, 1991).

Since the 1980s, development planners work-ing in poor countries have increasingly appreci-ated the resilience of poor people leading to

greater attention to the interpersonal trust andnetworking that enhance the collective opport-unities of members (Francois, 2002). SincePutnam’s series of articles critiquing its defici-ency in American society2, the concept of socialcapital has gained much prominence amongstdevelopmental planners (Leman, 1996; Potapchuket al., 1997). The emphasis on the group approachhas also come from the successes of micro-creditfinancing in rural parts of the world (Creevey,1996) such as Latin America (Hirschman, 1984),Bangladesh (Haider, 2000) and India (Fisher andSriram, 2002). This is because rural communitydevelopment as participation from below is madepossible by self-help or user-led groups, asfamilies, relatives, friends, neighbours and asso-ciates with shared motivations and concerns cometogether with a specific intention (Adams, 1996).

Another metaphoric concept experiencing arecent rise is ‘network’, its roots lying in theformulations of Radcliffe-Brown proposed earlyin 1940 in the USA and by Barnes (1954) in theUK. Newly independent India was at that time

toying with centralised Soviet style planningwhile trying to retain the rural ties that bind andprovide the foundation of Indian society. Net-works of social cooperation facilitate collectiveaction; yet Giarchi (2001) has criticised networksbecause they are theoretically systemic and empiric-ally mechanistic. He pointed out that networksbelong to the formal domain, whereas ‘social’pertains to the informal sector, and has suggestedthat ‘social circle’ rather than ‘social network’might conserve better the substantive meaningof the informal engagements that development

schemes attempt to capture. The evidence is mount-ing that communities can create and maintainmarked differentials in access to productive





resources (see, for example, Schrauwers, 1995;1999; Agrawal, 2001; Walker, 2001).

Cooperatives have had a long history inrural development planning in India. In 1904,the colonial British Government enacted laws

to encourage the formation of cooperatives inorder to free the farmers from the informaldebt-traps set by mahajans or moneylenders.Independent India too encouraged cooperat-ivisation to secure scale economies of productionfor the rural poor, and aimed for the eliminationof middlemen to increase efficiency, essentiallysummarised by the Maclegan Committee’sassertion of cooperativisation as the effectivemeans of harnessing the power of scale by anindividual through association with others. TheCooperative Planning Committee (on the eve of

independence in 1946) emphasised the aspect of voluntary association with common economicaims. The groups of women in DWCRA mayalso be seen as an exercise with parallels tocooperativisation (Karmakar and Ghosh, 2001,36), although the SHGs are not formally institu-tionalised cooperatives.

Participation in rural cooperatives is oftenseen as an instrument for the empowerment of women, opening new opportunities to master financial skills and create economic enterprises(Malhotra and Mather, 1997; Donahoe, 1999).Yet, statistics from the world over show that theparticipation rate of women in cooperatives islower than for men, especially in rural farmingor credit, which tend to be synonymous withmen’s activities. However, the importance of cooperatives for ensuring food security for poor families as well as for women remains great.There are spectacular success stories of usingthe scale dimension in rural development inIndia. For example, the National Dairy Develop-ment Board’s Amul model of cooperativisation

has made a ‘white revolution’ of sorts. In 1995,there were 540 000 rural women in 950 dairycooperatives in Gujarat, making Amul the largestmilk producer in the world (see for examplehttp://www.nddb.org/core_competencies/coop-ewic.htm). Examples of recent geographic andethnographic research on cooperative formationand survival are common (for example, Muters-baugh, 2002).

It must be remembered that some recentresearch on micro-credit in South Asia hasshown that the availability of credit can increase

women’s work burdens, and that men oftencontrol the income generated by the credit thatwomen receive (Rankin, 2001, 32). Acknow-

ledging the complex dimensions of entrepre-neurship and micro-credit, this paper does notdeny the significant achievements of theseprojects, but intends to critique the sweepinguse of the above concepts in SHGs for GAD

by highlighting how such approaches deny theindividual enterprise of rural women in par-ticular contexts such as Burdwan.

Rural women in Burdwan, India

Burdwan, located in the long-time Marxist-ruledstate of West Bengal, in eastern India is one of the richest districts in India with regard to agri-cultural and industrial-mining growth (Lahiri-Dutt, 2001). The eastern parts of Burdwanhave particularly done well in terms of canal-irrigated agricultural prosperity and panchayati

raj

(three-tier rural governance), and this un-usual success story has been intensely scrutinisedby experts (for example, Harriss, 1993; Rudd,1994; Banerjee and Ghatak, 1995; Sen andSengupta, 1995; Gazdar and Sengupta, 1999;Sanyal et al

., 1998; Samanta, 2002). Compara-tively little has been written about womenresponding to these changes. Women in ruralareas of Burdwan are primarily engaged indomestic chores such as food and fuel collec-tion; fetching of water for household use;childcare; and domestic cooking, washing andcleaning. However, a number of women, pri-marily from the lower castes, have also joinedthe informal labour force in agricultural fields,brick kilns, and construction work, and as millhands in local rice processing mills. The year-round cultivation provides jobs in the fields andalso in processing units and in richer farmers’homes as domestic help (Nandy, 2003). On thewhole, economic opportunities for rural womenare certainly better in Burdwan than in manyother parts of rural India.

The large majority of women come from caste-bound agricultural families (approximately 75%of Burdwan’s population is rural-based), ownno land of their own, work long hours, andcontribute substantially to the viability of thehousehold economy and the welfare of thefamily. Usually, they have little or no controlover household assets or means of production.Their control over incomes they may earn andmonies they may borrow is often tenuous. Ingeneral, women in Burdwan have more restrictedaccess than men to social services, and lower

security in food, life and property.Government schemes to alleviate poverty in

independent India have tried to empower women

http://www.nddb.org/core_competencies/coop-ewic.htm







primarily through a broadening of economicopportunities. Though such initiatives have along history3, it was the variety of pressures onthe government of India and state governmentsduring the 1980s and 1990s, especially from

international bodies and from affirmative actiongroups within, that gender issues began to betaken seriously in policy planning (Rajagopaland Mathur, 2000). Since 1953, the Indian statehas adopted a range of token schemes, but the1974 report4 of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, stressed that none of thesemeasures had any remarkable success in em-powering rural women. The declaration of 1975as International Year for Women and the dedica-tion of 1975–85 decade as International Women’sDecade were followed up by a host of state initia-

tives for women. The Integrated Child Develop-ment Scheme (ICDS), to provide food andmedical facilities for poorer children and their mothers, was most significant for improving thepre-natal and post-natal health of women. Anaspect of this was the priority allocation of dif-ferent development schemes for women. Theseefforts reveal an increasing appreciation that,in dealing with rural women’s issues, the basicneeds approach does not really take into con-sideration the institutional, legal and politicalaspects of inequality (Menon-Sen and Prabhu,2001)5. Yet, critical sectors like agriculture, ruraldevelopment, urban development, science andtechnology, and industry (to name only thosementioned in the Beijing+5 document) do nothave any explicitly women-specific schemes.Women in general continue to be identified pri-marily as mothers and, consequently, investingin building their individual capacities – asworkers, farmers and professionals – has beenlow on the list of priorities of the Indian state.

The DWCRA scheme6 is special because

in 1982/1983 it introduced an explicit gender approach in rural development. It was intendedto raise women’s socio-economic status andto encourage their economic self-sufficiencyby inculcating the idea of professionalism andaccountability through economically empoweringpoor rural women. The scheme essentially hingesupon the philosophy of collectivisation andbuilding social capital through networks, anddepends exclusively on the formation of SHGs.

DWCRA and SHG

The DWCRA scheme was initially started inthe ‘backward’, adivasi (tribal)-dominated, mar-ginal and semi-arid districts. Interestingly, the

more prosperous Burdwan received its firstDWCRA project eight years later, in 1991/1992.Initially, DWCRA was introduced to those ruralareas where the ICDS was running. The rationalebehind doing so was that the ICDS had been

useful in developing leadership among a fewwomen extension workers. However, a largenumber of SHGs in DWCRA became defunct;at last count, Burdwan had about 427 groupsin the district out of which 261 had failed tooperate (DRDA Cell, 2001). Of the 261 defunctgroups, about 35 had just initiated their primarysavings pool, but were unable to start any sortof economic activity. The 166 currently activegroups also have problems, mainly related tocapital supply and the marketing of products.

An SHG in DWCRA generally comprises

10–15 members, generally women from poor agricultural communities7. The group leader isusually chosen from among the group membersthrough a formal selection process, but she hasto be literate to be able to keep records andmaintain accounts. In almost every case, how-ever, we found that the group leader is the onlyexecutive and decision-maker. Only in the rarecase, is she helped by the assistant leader. Thisgoes against the grain of network and trustbuilding through cooperative actions. Theoretic-ally, there is no division of responsibilitywithin the group, but often decision-making isconcentrated due to the inherent social andcultural inequalities of the society that womenrepresent.

It is apparent that the concepts of socialcapital, civic engagement, networking andcooperativisation have been combined to giverise to DWCRA, which is also influenced by thesuccess of rural micro-credit schemes successfulelsewhere (see Pitt et al

., 2003 for a generaloverview of such schemes). The DWCRA

groups are in a quasi-united state where fundallotment and responsibility of repayment isgroup-specific; however, the utilisation of thefund is most often individual-specific andindependent, operating through intra-grouploan repayment norms8. Besides creating eco-nomically active women’s groups, the DWCRAscheme also aims to provide support for theoverall development of rural women in other fields such as literacy, health and legal assist-ance (GOWB, 1996) in the absence of whicheconomic enterprise-building largely loses its

edge. The existing social fabric remains un-changed, and the minimal benefits fail to attractwomen to form groups for self-help.





The economic functions taken up by theDWCRA groups can be grouped into six broadcategories. Most of these functions can be per-formed with minimum capital investment. Thefunctions include services such as book binding

and tea shops (12%), agro-processing (21%),household manufacturing such as the making of incense sticks, flower vases, cotton and woollengarments (9%), artisanal/traditional crafts suchas leather work, bamboo work, jute bags, pot-tery (21%), fisheries and cattle or livestockrearing/pasturing (15%), and mixed activitiesinvolving more than one function by a singlegroup (22%). Many of these activities compriseagro-processing and crafts – both traditional,non-farming occupations of women in ruralBengal. However, some respondents observed

that the group often could not decide on aparticular function. In most cases, the DRDAofficials were required to resolve disputes over choosing the function of the group. In micro-credit and other successful group approachstories, we find that such key agents have oftenplayed a significant role in preparing the tasks,helping women learn a new job and to copewith various local cultural factors (for example,Beaumont et al

., 1992). Power and controldynamics, and cooperation keep playing impor-tant roles in survival of a group. Unless therewards are sufficient, the groups are doomedto fail. What comprises ‘sufficient’ is highlysubjective. In a rich agricultural district likeBurdwan with well-articulated agro-processingand trading businesses as well as caste andreligious complexities, the ‘micro’ credit thatworks elsewhere may not appear to be suffi-cient to spur rural women into action. Aboveall, the group must help to either reinforceor construct a sense of identity among themembers. The official statistics suggest this has

not happened for DWCRA SHGs in Burdwan.The following section explores why they didnot.

Why did SHGs fail in Burdwan?

The DRDA report (2001) suggests that SHGsare not functioning well and that most groupsare experiencing a decline in membership. Our data indicate that volunteering in groups appearsto be far less attractive to women in Burdwanthan was anticipated by the administrators. Thatshould not be the case in a poor rural society

eager for civic engagement and the building upof social capital, as suggested by the literaturediscussed earlier.

Younger women in groups were involved infewer structured activities, such as householdmanufacturing, than older women. Short-termevents and actions were popular but longer activities such as learning crafts that are helpful

for ongoing learning of transferable skills wereoften seen as tedious and not worthwhile. Inaddition, the functioning groups were limited byinsufficient capital, which affects their ability tomarket their products. The various problems thathave led to the closure of SHGs can be groupedinto seven categories: production and techno-logy, organisation, raw material, infrastructure,finance and capital flow, marketing, and other problems. However, as we met members of failed groups, it became apparent that the failurewas due more to the lack of coordination and

communication between group members, thanthe reason given in the DRDA reports. Sig-nificant issues that came up during the courseof our individual conversations and group dis-cussions are summarised below.

Important questions in understanding thedynamics of failed groups are: how does a groupcome together and on what basis? How do thelocal social, economic, political and culturalinequalities continue to persist in a group? Howcan the leader ensure transparency to retaingroup members’ trust? We noted that the hier-archy of caste location often leads to increasinglevels of intra-group discordance. This wasexemplified by a member who said, ‘we werenever a group in the true sense. It is not surpris-ing that we could not work together’. We thenexplored further the reasons of failure amongsther colleagues; again we came across remarkson the difficulties of interaction betweenmembers across their caste and class divides.Such ruptures are not uncommon; in severalcases members spoke about missing a ‘real’

cohesiveness in the group leading to its fracture.Differences in political allegiance at the locallevel also caused rifts, causing a lack of integra-tion. The local political boss often tried to‘choose’ the group leader and in one such case,she had no time to create a dialogue among themembers to facilitate networking. Two other groups collapsed due to the lack of trust; as theleader did not reveal the details of the accountbook to other members, making others feel thatshe was trying to cheat. In yet another case,the leader keeping the records of income and

expenditure behaved in such secretive ways thatmisunderstanding with regard to loan repay-ments eventually splintered the group. In many





cases, the team leader has received little moreeducation than other group members, creatingproblems for the group in turn. Sometimesthe husband of the team leader became thevirtual leader of the group. Thus, we noted the

range of problems included first the additionalburden of keeping accounts, a task which theteam leader may be ill-equipped to perform;and second, the subtler question of the leader being among equals, which goes entirely againstthe very concept of ‘the group’ as the recipientof official support. The group leader often fur-thered her contacts with local political leadersand explored avenues for additional cashincomes.

The question of religious differences amongrural women was another factor leading to group

collapse. A woman panchayat

member notedin a group discussion that she found it difficultto involve women from Muslim families inactivities outside the home because of their lackof control over finances, movement or timemanagement. This was somewhat complicatedby Nasreen, a Muslim girl running a group.Nasreen noted that although Muslim mothersfollowing the purdah

are eager for their daughtersto acquire some education, investments in edu-cation and health have little expanded their choices in labour markets. Literacy workers playa significant role in the extension of literacyamong home-bound Muslim women, but theyare not permitted to bring the women into eco-nomic networks. As a result, Muslim womenwere conspicuously absent from the SHGs inBurdwan.

The most discussed grievance was that thegovernment does not allow women to build upcontacts and networks through one sort of activ-ity, and then apply it to another activity. This isthe essence of networking and empowerment:

enabling someone to choose freely the nextcourse of action. One participant felt that her initiative to educate Muslim women by teachingthem at home and by delivering books throughbuilding on her personal contacts established asan extension worker was thwarted when she wasnot permitted to form an SHG. She lamentedthat government officials do not acknowledgeinnovative initiatives and claimed this dissuadedher from adopting flexible programmes to suither specific target group. The same was true of literacy or ICDS workers who expected their

leadership to be fruitful and flourish in other income-generating activities, but who wereundermined by government officials when they

tried to set up groups with women contacts.In a context where women’s autonomy andphysical mobility are generally restricted bygender inequalities within the family, differ-ences in economic roles and power, son prefer-

ence, and oppressive cultural traditions, thislack of encouragement seems to be entirelybureaucratic and misplaced. Klenk (2004) inher study of ‘Who is the developed woman?’raises the question of new subjectivities beingcreated against the official version of ‘the self-maximizing entrepreneur’ of micro-credit schemes:

in this seemingly highly ‘localized context’,differently positioned rural women madestrategic use of and

reconfigured a develop-mental category, and thereby engaged with

and contributed to productions of develop-ment circulating at national and global levels.In so doing, they experimented with creativepossibilities for new, gendered subject posi-tions for themselves.

In Burdwan, as we noted these new and emerg-ent gendered subjectivities were either ignoredor suppressed by more powerful agents.

The lack of information flow and communica-tion among group members can take other formsas well. Health care was an important areawhere readily available information was inade-quate, and several participants raised this issue.For example, several women had not heard of the government scheme that provides financialassistance for pregnant mothers or of the smallincentive/grant for the birth of a girl child. Their village does not have a sealed access road or any primary health centre. Large rural tracts arepoorly serviced by roads of any kind and thereare roads that become inaccessible during therainy season (Samanta and Lahiri-Dutt, 1996).When the DRDA official selects a village for

initiation of groups, it is usually located on aroad accessible by government jeeps. In thisway, remote villages continue to remain outsidethe influence of DWCRA. Women from thevillages in this southern part of the Damodar repeatedly complained that they had poorer access to the government’s various schemesfor Women’s Development (WD). This area hastraditionally been the nikashi

(drainage) areafor the Damodar’s monsoon overspill, andthe embankment is lower and weaker alongthe southern bank of Damodar. These villages

are flood-prone and low-lying/waterlogged, andhave a higher concentration of lower castescompared with other villages of the eastern





agricultural tract. In addition to these logisticalproblems, women face gender-specific diffi-culties at different levels, such as political inter-vention or lack of gender sensitivity amongpanchayat members at the community level,

and active discouragement from male membersat the family level. The control of women’sinvolvement in the public sphere is often strong-est at the family level: husbands prevent womenfrom going out of the home; they use domesticquarrels, violence and other forms of intimidat-ing behaviour, and try to spend women’s savingsso that their payments in group formationbecomes irregular. Commenting on a similar situ-ation, Koczberski (1998, 403) noted that suchgeneralisations should not substitute for a con-textual analysis. The specific social and cultural

contexts of women’s lives need to be taken intoconsideration. It is clear that rural women inBurdwan are from diverse backgrounds; theyhave different levels of allegiance to network-ing, different household situations, differentlevels of wealth and status, and have differentneeds and interests. As long as these differencesare not recognised, it will remain difficult topropagate the SHGs.

The points raised by our participants areindeed significant; if the objective is to buildentrepreneurship among women, then the multi-plicity of ways a person operates must be recog-nised. Individual initiative is no longer eligiblefor government assistance as the formation of agroup has now become the most importantrequirement for the DWCRA. The governmentofficial too becomes helpless in her project. Theexample of Bela is pertinent here. After savingup some capital by working in the fields for afew years, she sought a matching loan from theDRDA, but was unsuccessful. The official main-tained that she was forced to refuse because

the DWCRA recognised only groups and notindividuals.In general, the large investments by the

government in creating SHGs in DWCRA shouldhave increased the social and economic oppor-tunities for poorer women living in rural areas.In reality, we found that most of these failedgroups were unable to act together, and often oneor two members in the group, crucial in bringingthe group together in the first place, left, leadingto the collapse of the group. In others cases, localspecificities – either of geography, community,

or individual personalities – were ignored bygovernment officials during their solicitations inchoosing the functions of the group.

Clearly, the key issues identified by thewomen in explaining the failure of SHGs fromtheir perspective were not envisioned by thegovernment agency’s policy formulations. Theseissues point out the inappropriate and gross

use of the concept of social capital by treatingwomen as voiceless subjects without agency(see Pryke’s 1991 critique of such perceptionsof women by developmental agencies).

Key issues and their relation to social capital

A primary reason for the poor performance of DWCRA is that women are ‘targets’ of actionand their voices are rarely heard. The problemwith ‘self-help’ schemes for women is the waythey problematise the ‘self’, mostly in themould of the bureaucrat’s own image, rather

than the women for whom these schemes aremade. The act of government officials ‘deter-mining’ what kind of activities women shouldengage in, invariably leads to replication of existing power structures within the society suchas caste.

In essentialising networking, the SHGsemphasise only the positive roles groups playin women’s empowerment. In ignoring theaspirations and enterprise of individual women,the government schemes defeat the very purposeof new entrepreneurial identities for women.Further, the idea behind the shift from assistanceto credit is the assumption that such assistanceschemes do not work in low-income countries.Such universalising principles deny localitiesand communities their specific characteristicsand needs. Factors such as caste and politicalallegiance as well as subtle class differencesinhibit the free flow of government informationfrom women panchayat

members to the womenof families below the poverty line. The womanas an individual in rural society must be viewed

as a free actor making her own decisions. Theimplied collectivity envisioned by DWCRAdoes not leave space for the individual’s agencyas a significant factor in determining women’sefforts. The interconnectedness of women’smultiple occupations and life roles is ignored bythis approach.

State policies must recognise and respect thenew identities women build and the new spacesthey create for themselves in the communitythrough their work efforts, and help to enhancethem. The individual is an important factor in

entrepreneurship and those with a high need for achievement become successful entrepreneurs.Individuals need to be motivated and this is not





usually encouraged in rural women. From her childhood, an Indian woman is brought up tobelieve that her place is at home, especially inmiddle-level farming families found in ruralBurdwan. Consequently, women lack the skills

and motivation needed to take up non-traditionaleconomic activities. Indeed, women who stepout of this mould need to be identified as leaderssetting examples for other women. As we saw,our participants felt that the state neglects toplay this supportive and encouraging role.

GAD schemes in India aiming at ruralwomen’s development are created to play asupportive role; they neither create specificopportunities for women, nor have specificprogrammes to encourage leadership. Giventhe socio-cultural environment of a prosperous

farming region such as Burdwan, the schemesmust address specific contextual needs andrequirements rather than act as restrictive instru-ments. They must also provide financial andcommercial support systems, research and train-ing institutions, and extension and consultancyservices that are yet to reach rural women ade-quately and to address their risk factors.

In concluding our paper, we are reminded of a ‘participatory development and the appropria-tion of agency’ case study, showing how thismodel of ‘development thinking ascribes agencyto collectivities of poor people’ (Green, 2000,70). Indeed, the goals of personal developmentencompass a range of lifestyle aspirations,including being more modern, having more edu-cation, increased access to off-farm incomesand, in the context of the pervasive collapse of state services and periodic food insecurity,enough money to provide for a person’s family.A longer-term goal is to build a brick house,which can act as a sign of status and an objectof wealth. Do the government schemes take an

approach sympathetic to these relatively indi-vidualistic aspirations? There is no doubt thatnotions of the group underlying a sense of com-munity is an important motivator, but this localunderstanding of the community needs to becarefully contextualised in view of the evidencefrom our study. Hobsbawm (1996, 40) com-mented, ‘Men and women look for groups towhich they can belong, certainly and forever, ina world in which all else is moving and shifting,in which nothing else is certain’.

Our research demonstrates that whilst the

broader contexts of cooperative and householdlabour allocations continue to remain enigma-tic, development schemes assume that women

exercise agency in creating development out-comes and this agency is embedded in culturalunderstandings of what development is and howit operates. What this agency presupposes is akind of imagined ‘group’; a group in which

people come together willingly, create their networks, and act in a cooperative manner irre-spective of local heterogeneities within the com-munity. A group, in DWCRA, thus needs tobe artificially produced and handpicked, whichmakes it fragile and vulnerable, giving neither long-term security nor bringing real empower-ment to women.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe authors would like to thank Ms Helen Glazebrook of Resource Management in Asia Pacific Program for her technical assistance, and the anonymous referees for their

constructive criticisms and suggestions for grammaticalimprovements of this paper. The study was partly sponsoredby UNIFEM through a Calcutta-based NGO, Sachetana, for which we are grateful.

NOTES1. If ‘capital’ is defined for convenience as investment of

resources with expected returns in the marketplace,

then social capital, following Lin (2001, 3) could be

defined as capital that is captured in social relations

that evokes structural constraints and opportunities as

well as actions and choices on the part of the actors.

2. In his latest study, Putnam has emphasised that ‘social

capital is generally distributed unequally – more trust-ing, more joining, more voting, and so on among the

better-off segments of society’ (Putnam, 2002, 414).

3. Although colonial rule was pivotal in bringing about

critical social reforms that included women’s education

among other things such as sati prevention, it generally

recognised that women’s position could be used as an

indicator of society’s advancement.

4. The committee’s report titled Towards Equality led to

increased lobbying for more visibility of women as

well as bringing women’s empowerment issues to the

centre of policy debate.

5. As many as 35 poverty alleviation schemes could be

classified as ‘women-specific’, with 23 being located inthe Department of Women and Child Development.

Menon-Sen and Prabhu (2001) identified three types of

women-related programmes leading to empowerment:

financial and technical support, including the Indira

Mahila Yojana (IMY), Mahila Samridhhi Yojana (MSY),

Rashtriya Mahila Kosh (RMK) and Swashakti; socio-

economic programmes for special categories of women;

and schemes for children’s welfare.

6. Initially started as a pilot project in 50 districts of the

country, DWCRA begins with multiple objectives of

organising poor rural women, developing awareness

and agency in them regarding different societal aspects

of their life, improving work skills and economicconditions, and making them aware of different develop-

ment schemes for them.





7. In April 1999, SGSY was introduced to emphasise

Self-Help Groups (SHG) identified as ‘a collection of

rural poor who have volunteered to organize them-

selves into a group for improving the standard of living

of the members’ (GOI, 2002).

8. In most cases, group members adhere to the practice of

saving Rs10–20/person/month (A$1=Rs30) under thesmall savings scheme. The formulation of this initial

capital is critical for the group as it determines the

availability and level of government funding assistance.

Capital formation and creation of a revolving fund by

a self-help group, therefore, is the first pre-requisite for

the formalisation of a DWCRA team. The financial

assistance for starting any economic activity is dis-

bursed in two phases of Rs15 000 and Rs10 000 to

each group, as a revolving fund for running expenses.

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Self Help Groups and Social Capital

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