Scheming Schemes

With the Chief Minister Women's Employment Scheme, JEEVIKA and similar programmes, Nitish Kumar has turned welfare into a powerful electoral strategy, forcing his rivals to follow suit

- Ashlin Mathew

KUMKUM Devi spends most of her day bent over a fire, cooking meals for others to earn a living.

Her spouse is a former bus conductor and one of her two sons is back in town as a gig worker after working elsewhere as a migrant. For the younger son who is a student, Kumkum dreams of a life less difficult than her own. As a member of a JEEViKA self-help group (SHG) in Danapur town of Bihar’s Patna district, Kumkum had got a low-interest loan that helped her run her own little breakfast stall for a while until the rising rent and electricity cost forced her to shut it down.

Kumkum’s household is one of the nearly 1.4 crore households—roughly 60 per cent of rural Bihar—that are counted as beneficiaries of the JEEViKA welfare programme. Launched in 2007 under the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project supported by the World Bank, it mobilises women into SHGs for diversifying and enhancing household incomes with improved access to finance and direct linkage to markets. Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has pledged permanent jobs for the JEEVIKA didis, with a monthly salary of Rs 30,000 and an interest-free loan, if the INDIA bloc comes to power. Without making any matching promise, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) has dismissed Tejashwi's and alleged instead that women's development was confined to their own families during the reign of the RJD leaders.

The ruling coalition, on its part, launched the Chief Minister Women's Employment Scheme, a flagship cash-transfer scheme that has deposited Rs 10,000 each into the accounts of 75 lakh women. Kumkum, however, complains this amount hasn't reached her-and she is not alone.

“Whether the schemes are reaching the intended groups can only be confirmed through proper evaluations. Overall, things have improved,” says development economist Dipa Sinha of Azim Premji University.