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| T.K.Jose, Kudumbasree Poverty Eradication Mission, State Muncipal House, Thiruvananthapuram 695010 Ph: 0471- 2728320 |
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Little drops make a mighty ocean. In 3 years, the Kudumbasree Poverty Eradication Mission under T.K.Jose, IAS, has been able to channelise Rs.305 crores as savings from its 27 lakh below poverty line women volunteers from their weekly single denomination rupee contributions. And if this creation of wealth out of poverty isn’t significant enough, these volunteers have, through their Neighbourhood Groups disbursed Rs.510 crores as loans to the needy among themselves.
Jose, an M.Sc in statistics with MBA, has closely studied deprivation. He has carried on from the efforts of few committed IAS officers who had done pilot works of similar nature in ward level. He has done a new benchmarking for poverty, whereby the old calorie-income yardstick has been replaced with a 9 point deprivation risk index, that includes factors like alcoholic husband and widowhood.
In Kerala, where strikes and stoppages are quite frequent, it is rare to see the culture of Kudumbasree, where work goes on even at 9 pm in the head office at Thiruvananthapuram.
The ubiquitous Kudumbasree women have tried their hands at almost everything – from IT units to garbage collection and from leased land farming to solid waste management and tuition centre for weak students. It is therefore only befitting that Kudumbasree, which is Asia’s largest such grouping of women, has won kudos at the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management meet for 3 consecutive years.
Kudumbasree facilitates self help with demand-led convergence of available resources to tackle poverty holistically. Jose cites the case of Lilly Menon, a Kudumbasree activist of Kochi, who was adjudged the best entrepreneur in the recently held Business2 Business at Kochi. Her soap unit in Kozhikode is already the envy of detergent majors. “Such micro-level successes have made entrepreneurs think in terms of a life beyond years of absolute poverty,” says Planning Board Member-Secretary S.M.Vijayanand, who along with Jose also played a key role in evolving the Kudumbasree model.
Courtesy: John Mary, Outlook, June 7, 2004
Contributed by: Administrator
