1

Université Paris-Dauphine

Mémoire de Recherche

Master 2 Recherche: Analyses et Théories du

Développement Durable

Année 2008-2009

An Understanding of Women Self-Help Groups in

India

Etudiant: Nabil ABDO

Directeur de Mémoire: M. Pierre MACLOUF

Le 15 Septembre 2009

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Table of Contents

1. Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................... 3

2. Introduction ...................................................................................................... 4

3. Methodology and Theoretical Framework ....................................................... 9

4. Chapter 1: Governments and NGOs: representations and worlds of thoughts

behind the formation of self-help groups. ..................................................................... 13

4.1. Government as actor: Self-help groups as an alternative development strategy

or public policy instrument? .......................................................................................... 13

4.1.1. Self-Help Groups as an alternative development project. .............................. 14

4.1.2. Self-Help Groups as public policy instruments. ............................................. 19

4.2. NGOs as agents of empowerment or vehicles of a style of thoughts? ........... 25

4.2.1. Why NGOs chose women? ............................................................................. 25

4.2.2. What is behind the concept of empowerment? ............................................... 30

5. Chapter 2: Self-Help Groups and the Logic of Collective Action ................. 39

5.1. Why does Olson‟s theory apply to self-help groups? ..................................... 39

5.1.1. How through self-help groups NGOs and government are shaping the

women‟s style of thoughts............................................................................................. 40

5.1.2. Does group size matter? ................................................................................. 45

5.2. Collective action in self-help groups: an “Olsonian” methodological

individualism ingrained in the Gandhian tradition. ....................................................... 50

5.2.1. Self-help groups: a combination of mechanisms governing latent groups and

the properties of small groups ....................................................................................... 50

5.2.2. Self-help groups: ingrained in the Gandhian Philosophy. .............................. 57

6. Conclusion. ..................................................................................................... 62

7. Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 66

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1. Acknowledgments

I would like to present my appreciation to all those who made this work possible,

especially my Professor Pierre MACLOUF who was always there when I needed

guidance and advice. Moreover I would like to thank all the women I interviewed in

Rajendranagar slum in Bangalore, as well as in the rural area of Hoskote who

overwhelmed me with their kindness, humbleness and welcoming spirit. I would like to

thank the staff of the Center of Social Action for making these interviews possible and

for providing me with translators who were always available when I needed them.

Moreover, I would like to express my gratitude to all my classmates in the

Masters of Social Work in Christ University who welcomed me, and considered me as

one of their own, thus providing me with the best ambiance to conduct my study. Their

friendliness, open spirit and understanding have made my journey in India extraordinary

and extremely enriching.

Finally I hope that my research will considered as a useful document that will

help to better understand women self-help groups in India by having a fresh and new

perspective on their logic and functioning.

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2. Introduction

Since its independence, India has been faced with the problems of poverty and

inequality. Being the second largest country in the world in terms of population, India

had always a huge mass of poor due to several factors mainly a long history of

colonization and exploitation by the former British Empire (our concern in this work is

not about the structural reasons of poverty and inequality). Hence the successive post-

independence governments have put alleviating poverty at the top of their priorities. The

strategies toward achieving this objective have ranged from a socialist to liberal

philosophies. The socialist model of state control and state-led and centralized projects to

alleviate poverty has failed, this failure was admitted upon the break-down of the soviet

empire, and the rise of neo-liberal policies in the late eighties of the past century.

Meanwhile, the micro-finance frenzy was at its dawn with the Grameen bank in

Bangladesh, this experience was in perfect harmony with the logic of neo-liberalism by

not rejecting the premises of free market and private enterprise, thus suggesting a solution

to address market failures by integrating the poor into the finance system.

The success of the microfinance model has been transformed by international

organizations to the magic formula for eradicating poverty in the world, and the United

Nations Development Agency and other development agencies, and even multinationals

have been liberating funds for this “revolutionary scheme” that will put an end to

poverty, and at the same time provide a major source of profit; the poor that were once

excluded from the financial market have become a huge source of a morally satisfying

profit. Parallel to the rise of microfinance, women issues, and gender issues have also

taken a huge step in the international arena, specifically in development agencies; gender

concerns have affirmed themselves as a main and inevitable subject while dealing with

development and poverty1. In fact, development practitioners and policy makers at the

international and local levels have put women at the center of their actions against

poverty and inequality, thus considered the fight against gender discrimination and for

1 The United Nations declared the years from 1976 to 1985 the women decade.

2 Palier, J. (2005). Defining the concept of empowerment through experiences in India. In I. Guérin, & J.

Palier, Microfinance Challenges: Empowerment or Disempowerment of the poor (pp. 35-55). Pondichérry:

5

gender equality to be at the heart of path towards social development. These

developments paved the way for the concept of women empowerment to emerge, and to

become the main word in the development jargon, and women have become the engine of

development.

One of the main conclusions of the microfinance experience was that empowering

women provides the best outcome for fighting poverty and bettering the socio-economic

welfare of the household since women are assumed to be concerned more about child

education, improving the conditions of the family when they generate more income2, thus

since the 1990s the main focus of development schemes have become centered on

women, hence hitting two birds in one stone: gender equality and poverty alleviation.

This brings us to the focus of our work: the self-help groups. Many forms of self-help

groups exist, and this notion differs from developing and developed countries. In fact

self-help groups are known in the developed part of the world as a group of people

having a common problem (alcoholism, anger, homeless) getting together to support each

other psychologically by talking about their difficulties and hence trying to overcome the

difficulties caused by their current situations, it is basically people trying to help

themselves through sharing experience. Nevertheless, the concept became wider in the

context of developing countries, especially in India which is the focus of this paper. In

fact self-help groups in India and other developing countries have transformed to being a

microfinance scheme of rotating savings and loans, in addition to the original concept

that we spoke about above. In India, the self-help group movement started in 1992 with

several NGOs initiating these groups in rural areas3 in order to improve the situation of

2 Palier, J. (2005). Defining the concept of empowerment through experiences in India. In I. Guérin, & J.

Palier, Microfinance Challenges: Empowerment or Disempowerment of the poor (pp. 35-55). Pondichérry:

Institut Français de Pondichérry.

3 Hofmann, E., & Marius-Gnanou, K. (2004). L‟empowerment des femmes entre relativisme culturel et

instrumentalisation dans des évaluations de la microfinance en Inde. Premières journées du GRES.

Bordeaux IV.

6

women and of the rural communities. Therefore, self-help groups became in a vast

majority as a group constituted solely of poor, disadvantaged women, generally from

lower castes who are being brought together to be able to get loans and to conduct some

services and improvements in their communities.

The idea of a self-help group is simple: an NGO or the government in a poor area

be it slums or neglected villages, goes and sets up a self-help group constituted of 15-20

women. These women save weekly a small amount of money in a common pool with

very low interest (1%) and they also borrow money from this common pool with a 2%

interest. The difference between this scheme and the traditional microfinance practice is

that the money stays in a closed circle, the group, which means that the women don‟t

seek microfinance institutions in order to borrow money, but they borrow from their own

money that they save weekly. Nevertheless there is a self-help group –bank linkage in

order for the women to be able to put the saved money in the bank or borrow a

considerable amount to add to the existing pool. However, what distinguishes those

groups is that women take up services for the community such as starting a health center

in the area, waste management schemes, nursery for the children, and other types of

actions that serve the community. The self-help innovation has constituted a success to

the extent that the governments in the different states in India have started their own self-

help groups that take up the same work as the NGO initiated groups.

NGOs and governments see the self-help groups as an efficient way to enhance

decentralization and local governance at the most grass root level. In a matter of fact,

India has committed itself to decentralization since more than two decades through the

activation of the local governance bodies, especially the Panchayati Raj institutions that

are a sort of municipal boards at the village level, but also women have been given a one-

third quota in these institutions. Hence the self-help groups meet both the ambitions of

the state of India to decentralize at the biggest level possible its institutions in order to

increase participation and the democratic vocation of the regime, but they also meet the

new dominating concepts in the current development paradigm which we will speak

about. The self-help groups are now the most popular invention in India amongst NGOs

and government and are considered as an efficient and innovative way to fight poverty,

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gender discrimination, and to improve and enhance the practice of democracy in India,

and to overcome corruption and government inefficiencies in implementing public

programs. The latter point is very important as we shall see later, since it is now observed

that the government is delegating many programs to the women in those groups in order

to implement public works like neighborhood upgradation, road maintenance and other

responsibilities that the government used to do, and that in the name of fighting

corruption and increasing participation.

This phenomenon of self-help groups is quite interesting to study since it has

become an authority in development works, and it is considered by NGOs and state

governments as way of meeting the millennium development goals, and one of the best

ways to better local democratic governance, and fight poverty. Moreover, donors

agencies are also fan of this concept and hence don‟t hesitate to give funds to the NGOs

willing to start up these groups, since they have proven to be financially viable and

sustainable. The self-help scheme is thus considered a flawless way towards development

and empowerment of women and disadvantaged communities. According to their

advocates, the self-help groups allow women to have bargaining power with their

husbands and the local authorities, when they are united, they can help each other against

domestic violence, economic difficulties and overcoming the inherent disadvantage they

have in society. Hence self-help groups began to spring in an exponential manner( in

2004 more than 1 million self-help groups were present, over 90% of which are

composed of women4).

What is interesting about this phenomenon is that while it is being highly praised,

it is not a local initiative, i.e. it is not the women of the community who took the step to

organize themselves, but it was the NGOs and the state governments who gathered the

women in order to get together in one solid group. From what precedes, we have

elaborated our research question which is: how do the women Self-Help groups in India

function as small groups according to Olson‟s typology in his path-breaking book “The

4 Hofmann, E., & Marius-Gnanou, K. (2004). L‟empowerment des femmes entre relativisme culturel et

instrumentalisation dans des évaluations de la microfinance en Inde. Premières journées du GRES.

Bordeaux IV.

8

Logic of Collective Action”5? In order to answer this question, we will examine the

different actors involved in this microfinance innovation. The actors of our interest are

those who are involved in the formation, functioning and sustainability of these self-help

groups who are: the women self-help groups, the non-governmental organizations

(NGOs) and the government who are responsible of the creation of these groups.

Therefore it would be essential to ask the following question: what are the reasons and

logic that those two actors follow in order to form these groups and what are the

representations that they hold of these groups? Moreover, as mentioned earlier, these

groups are not self-initiated by the women themselves, but they are launched by external

actors, i.e. NOGs and government: having a common interest, why didn‟t these women

form the groups by their own initiatives?

In the following passages, I will argue that the functioning logic of the self-help

groups obey in a direct way to Olson‟s theory on collective action which contends that

people do not organize themselves and engage in collective action in an automatic way

when common interest is involved. Instead, mechanisms of selective incentives and

coercion are involved in order to have a collective action and a sustainable organization.

My research will be divided in two chapters: the first chapter will deal with the external

actors as presented above, in which we will try to understand their different roles,

representations and logic they have. We will argue that despite the ambitious

development aspiration behind creating self-help groups, the government is playing a role

in instrumentalizing those groups hence becoming more a tool for development rather

than actors of development. Moreover we will try to show that NGOs, through the used

development concepts, like empowerment, they are transmitting the style of thoughts6 of

international institutions, like the World Bank , to these groups therefore influencing their

functioning and logic. The second chapter will deal with the self-help groups themselves

where we will see how the external actors play a crucial role in rendering these women

5 Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

6 Douglas, M. (1986). How Institutions Think. New York: Syracuse University Press.

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apt to the reasoning of methodological individualism, applying a cost-benefit analysis to

their mindset. Through this chain of thoughts we will conclude by examining these

groups according to Olson‟s theory of collective action.

3. Methodology and Theoretical Framework

The methodology followed in the research is a qualitative one and based on the

collection of documents and works dealing with the subject matter. It consists of

conducting interviews with women members in the self-help groups from the urban slum

of Rajendranagar in the city of Bangalore, and also interviews with the rural women in

the country side of Bangalore in order to spot the differences in conducting their actions

and also the NGO approach. Interviews were also made with people working in the NGO.

The bulk of the work is with the Center of Social Action, an NGO based in Christ

University in Bangalore. The choice of the NGO was not within my control since I was

doing a semester exchange in Christ University hence the Center for Social Action was

the only NGO I had access to. Moreover when I requested that I be connected with other

NGOs, the responsible in the Center for Social Action said that it won‟t be a problem and

kept stalling for a long time to give me an answer until when it was too late they told me

that it is not possible to interview other NGOs due to the fact that the others refused from

fear of competition.

I will try to fill this gap by literature work on other NGOs in India dealing with

self-help groups. nevertheless this is not the only shortcoming in my research, in fact my

dependency on the Center for Social Action was an important obstacle for me since their

processes were slow, the personnel was not fully cooperative since every time I had to

request an interview with a self-help group it would take several weeks in order for it to

be arranged and this was a huge setback for my research due to my short time of stay in

India. Another factor that hindered the process of my research was the language barrier,

as in India the national languages are Hindi and English, however poor people don‟t

speak English and speak a bit of Hindi which I can‟t speak. Thus the interviews were in

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Kannada (local language of the state of Karnataka), Tamil (local language of the state of

Tamil Nadu), or Telugu (local language of the state of Andhra Pradesh). Therefore I had

to speak through an intermediary who was an employee of the Center of Social Action

which presented a double disadvantage: first I could not get directly what the interviewee

was saying because we were communicating through a translator, hence I could not know

if she was conveying to me everything that was said by the women: sometimes she would

summarize what the woman said, sometimes she would answer on behalf of the woman

as she considers the answer to my questions are obvious, or she could add up to what the

woman was saying.

The second obstacle was that since the translator worked for the Center for Social

Action, the women interviewed might not say everything they have in mind out of

precaution, fear or respect to the NGO sponsoring them, or they would say and reiterate

the rhetoric of the Center for Social Action in order to please the representative or to

prove that she had assimilated and integrated the notions on which she was trained.

Adding up to that, the fact that I had little time for me to gain their full confidence, but

also they were not available for a long time since I had the chance to meet them for

twenty minutes as they were in their break time and they had to go to work. Hence the

interviews were somehow brief to the time constraint and to the fact that there had to be

translation so the interviews were taken double the time they required. Moreover the

NGO personal always denied the presence of a caste problem within the groups or their

communities and even told me not to speak about the subject to the interviewees which

prevented me from dealing in depth with the caste factor in the actions of the self-help

groups.

Nevertheless it must be noted that the translator was trying to be helpful and gave

me her fulltime while I was visiting, and was very nice and welcoming. Also, the women

I interviewed were not suspicious of me, and were very willingly ready to give conduct

the interview, and were talkative, and answered every question I head with no hesitation

or a sign of resistance. I find it important to mention that I was overwhelmed by the

kindness, simplicity and humbleness of these women as they were very welcoming and

some of them shared with me some personal problems they had. A last factor that

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blocked the process of my work was the poorly equipped libraries in the city and in the

university: the university library is equipped with only a couple of shelves of sociology

books, and the bookstores in the city didn‟t even have a sociology section, hence the non-

availability of books was an important problem for my research. Despite the many

obstacles I encountered that may have caused many flaws in my research I tried to fill all

these gaps with the many of papers written on this subject that have taken over the

spotlight in development work.

The theoretical framework I will be using will be a combination of Mancur

Olson‟s work embodied in his book “the logic of collective action” and the work of Mary

Douglas through her book “How institutions think”7. I will use Douglas‟ work in order to

analyze the external actors influencing the self-help groups. In fact, Douglas incorporates

Fleck‟s theory in her book, in which she argues that institutions circulate a style of

thoughts according to which individuals think and act. This concept will be used in order

to explain how NGOs and government are changing the mindsets and attitudes of the

women in question in this study, and in order to understand the factors that inhibited

women from organizing themselves. Olson‟s theory, which is the main support of my

research, argues that people don‟t conduct collective actions and build organizations for

the only reason of having a common interest, but they engage in different mechanisms of

coercion and selective incentives in order to make the collective action possible. Hence

through the combination of these mechanisms, rational individuals will engage in a cost-

benefit analysis on whether to decide to engage in such endeavor.

Olson makes a difference between large and small groups and asserts that the

mechanisms we spoke about above are not needed for small groups. However, Douglas

will extend Olson‟s theory to small group which supports our research question and

findings. Hence this combination of Olson‟s and Douglas‟ work will enable us to

understand the functioning of the self-help groups which is deeply affected by the

external actors we already spoke about. The contribution of these works will be detailed

7 Douglas, M. (1986). Op .cit.

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and presented in more length in the coming passages. However, it should be noted that

Douglas‟ work is used in our research in order to support Olson‟s theory to be applied on

self-help groups and in order to understand the role of NGOs and government in the

process.

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4. Chapter 1: Governments and NGOs: representations and

worlds of thoughts behind the formation of self-help

groups.

In this first chapter we will be dealing with the actors involved in the formation,

support and sustainability of self-help groups, i.e. governments and NGOs. The chapter

will be divided in two parts; each part deals with a different actor: the first part will deal

with the government (or state government as India is federal state) and the second part

will deal with the NGOs. We will see through this chapter the different usages and

representations that these two actors have of the self-help groups.

4.1. Government as actor: Self-help groups as an

alternative development strategy or public policy

instrument?

The government is a main actor in initiating self-help groups but also in providing

a suitable institutional environment to foster and host these groups. The fact that the

government has embraced this scheme, and used it as a main tool for social development,

has helped to boost this movement in order to become now the major policy used to

alleviate poverty and empower the poor. Hence it has adopted it as a continuation of the

decentralization logic used in order to reach the poor in the country. However as many

schemes and projects that first seem benign and ambitious, self-help groups have a great

chance to slip towards becoming instrumentalized and a mere tool in order for the

government to delegate its responsibilities to individuals at a much lower cost, and hence

self-help groups became solely civil servants instead of becoming a powerful movement

towards changing the reality of the poor. In the following passages we will examine

theses aspects of self-help groups as promoted by the government.

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4.1.1.Self-Help Groups as an alternative development

project.

As stated in the introduction, India is a country on which colonization had

considerable impact. In fact, the Indian society is marked by a very hierarchical social

system embodied in the caste system which is very complex. This system places the

Indian society in a very rigid hierarchy, where social mobility is rendered very difficult.

The caste system dictates a social division of labor where every caste has a certain set of

jobs assigned to it according to its place in the hierarchy. Hence the lower the social

group is placed in the system, the lower status jobs are meant for this group (reference).

Nevertheless, this rigidity was not present in pre-colonial India, but instead it was

accentuated during the British colonial rule. In fact, “castes and religious communities as

we know them today are very much a product of enumeration, classification and

categorization by the colonial state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”8. Therefore,

at the dawn of liberation, the independence political establishment inherited a more than

ever rigid hierarchical societal order that was in contradiction with the egalitarian and

democratic vocation of the post-independence political system9. The political

establishment, hoped that this contradiction will soon fade away with end of the colonial

rule, eventually this didn‟t happen10

. Hence, the successive governments continuously

launched programs targeting lower castes in the aim of overcoming this contradiction

between the social system and the political one.

The government support for Self-Help groups comes in line with these poverty

alleviation programs. The difference is that before the 1990s, the programs were more

interventionist and were mainly characterized by a high level of subsidies, and hence the

self-help groups marked the government adoption of a participative approach, where the

8 Randeria, S. (1999). Entangled histories of uneven modernities: Civil society, caste solidarities and legal

pluralism in post-colonial India. Theory, Cultural and Society. London.

9 Beteille, A. (1999, March 6-13). Empowerment. Economic and Political weekly .

10 Ibid.

15

women through self-help groups are considered to be an integral part of the local

development process away from the decisions of the central government11

.

The Indian government‟s target population moved from the lower castes in

general to women in these castes. In fact, women are considered to be the oppressed

within the oppressed, that is where an individual is disadvantaged by being a part of a

lower caste, a women who is in this low caste has a double disadvantage: first for being

underprivileged due to her place in the social hierarchy, and second due to being a

women, the inequalities in the Indian society is played along the lines of caste and

gender12

.

The Indian government soon recognized the importance of targeting women

through its successive five-year plans since 1979. In fact, from 1979 onward the Indian

government started including women in its targets in the centralized plans. Hence women

moved from being considered as an essential part of rural development (the 1979-1984

Five Year Plan) to a situation where the Five Year of 1997-2002 Plan13

committed itself

to empower women as agents of social change and development, to create an enabling

environment for women as equal partners with men, where women can freely exercise

their rights both within and outside home and to be organize into self-help groups

marking the beginning of a major process of empowerment (section 3.8.27). Government,

however, plays a passive and indirect role in self-help groups formation and

functioning14

. This strategy was continued in the 10th Plan (2002–07) with the

government committed “to encourage self-help Groups mode to act as the agents of

11

Hofmann, E., & Marius-Gnanou, K. (2004). Op. cit.

12 Beteille, A (1999). Op. cit.

13 The Government of India. (1997). Ninth Five Year Plan, 1997-2002. New Delhi: The Planning

Commission of India.

14 Sabhlok, S. G. (2006). Self-Help as a Strategy for Women's Development in India. 16th Biennial

Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. Wollongong.

16

social change, development and empowerment of women”15

. As we can see the

government explicitly declared its adoption of the self-help group enterprise. Moreover,

due to this policy choice of the government of India, nowhere else in the world does a

microfinance scheme have this institutional support and enabling environment which is a

crucial element in the flourishing of self-help groups16

.

Thus the biggest rural development program in India, the Integrated Rural

Development Program (IRDP) introduced in the 1980s -and aiming to provide access to

institutional credit to every person under the poverty line- was replaced by SGSY

(Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojna). The latter was introduced in 1999 and has the

same objective as the former, but modifies the conditions to the access to credit. The

major change lies in the fact that the logic has shifted to be a collective one instead of

individual one accused of being the source of the failure of the IRDP. Hence the program

adopts the self-help group concept through its collective nature in order to permit the

acquisition of credit. Therefore we see that the government of India has taken self-help

groups as the major tool for social development. Thus the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu,

Selvi J. Jayalalitha, declared: “a silent economic revolution has taken place in rural areas

of Tamil Nadu following empowerment of women with the formation of self-help

groups. […] The self-help groups gave women a "top status" in society and they were not

dependent on men anymore”17

.

However it is useful to examine the logic behind the adoption of women self-help

groups as the panacea for development and poverty alleviation. This attitude by the

government has different assumptions that range from: economic growth, to

empowerment, participation and democracy. Let us examine each of these criteria.

15

The Government of India. (2002). Tenth Five Year Plan, 2002-2007. New Delhi: The Planning

Commission of India.

16 Guérin, I., & Palier, J. (2004, May 25-27). Les Self-Help Groups en Inde du Sud en tant qu'espaces de

discussions et d'actions collectives permettent-ils un accès à plus de "pouvoirs". Communication présentée

aux XXèmes journées ATM-CREDES . Nancy.

17 Sivaganga, C. (2004, March 24). SHGs have ushered in rural economic revolutions. The Hindu .

17

As stated before one of the major concerns of the Indian political system is to

reduce the gap between the egalitarian vocation as stated in the constitution and the

hierarchical social system. Hence one of the aims of self-help groups is a further

decentralization of decision making to the most local level, and also to encourage women

in order to participate in the public life. This logic is inserted in the principle of

participatory development where the beneficiaries of the programs are themselves

involved in the process of implementation. Hence since the 1992, 72nd

and 73rd

constitutional amendments- where women are granted a one third of the seats in the

Panchayatis Raj Institutions that are the local governance bodies at the village level- self-

help groups are being mobilized in order to encourage women to run for the local

elections18

.

Moreover, groups are intentionally made informal and in a small size in order to

avoid their association to the practices of bureaucracy and corruption19

. Those

characteristics have long been those of the public authorities dealing with these categories

of people. Therefore the self-help groups provide the opportunity for women from the

lower casts who have been long excluded from local governance in order to become a

member of the Panchayats20

. These groups are meant to reintegrate women into the

public space.

Moreover, one of the main recommendations when forming a self-help group is

that the members be from a homogenous social background21

which means belonging to

18

Kovacs, A. (2005, April 21). NGOs, Women‟s Collectives and Women‟s Empowerment In India. Thesis

handed to Prof.Buckland .

19 Sabhlok, S. G. (2006). Op. cit.

20 Pant, M. (2004, December). Potential of Self-Help Groups for Enhancing Participation of Women in

Local Self Governance. New Delhi, India: PRIA.

21 National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development. (n.d.). A handbook on forming Self Help Groups.

Retrieved July 27, 2009, from http://www.nabard.org/pdf/publications/manuals/formingshgs.pdf

18

the same caste. This attribute will allow the government to better channel the public

programmes22

. As it is well known, a person who belongs to the Scheduled Castes or to

Other Backward Caste doesn‟t benefit from the same public program or to the same

positive discrimination measures with respect to certain employment opportunities,

therefore self-help groups constitute an effective intermediate for government programs

to reach the targeted population. However this has the danger to reinforce caste identities.

One last motivation behind government support and formation of self-help groups

is the fact that gender discriminations and inequality impact the economic growth of the

country, as the female part of the country is excluded from the contribution to production.

Therefore women should be helped due to their role in development; investing in their

capabilities and expanding their choices is not only valuable as an end by itself, but it is

also a certain way to contribute to economic growth and development23

. But also women

are assumed to make better use of the resources for the well being of the family, which is

expenditure for food and health. Men in India are accused of spending their money on

gambling and alcohol. Therefore giving more income to women will have a multiplying

effect on the family as a whole. Therefore it would be wiser to target women than men in

microfinance project. However, by having this assumption, there is a risk to reinforcing

this view and adding more burdens on the woman as the sole responsibility bearer in the

family. As we will see later, governments and non-governmental organizations share

many views and assumptions while initiating self-help groups. In a matter of fact we will

later show that these actors assert a certain “style of thoughts24

that the dominant social

institution in India holds, which is contradictory to the claims of social change that these

actors declare to advance.

Through these assumptions, the frame of thoughts held by social institutions are

also shared by the political institutions governing the country, hence circulating a role

already played by the Indian woman as the main person holding most responsibilities in

22

Guérin, P & Palier, J (2004). Op. cit.

23 Palier, J (2005). Op. cit.

24 Douglas, M (1986). Op. cit.

19

the household embodied in taking care of the well being of her family. This theory

developed by Fleck and later used by Douglas to explain the functioning of institutions in

a certain society is crucial to our analysis in order to understand how external actors (in

this first part, the government) are affecting the functioning of self-help groups and the

impact they have on women. The style of thoughts that the government hold is not alien

to the structure of society as it is a part of it. However, we shall see that since the

economic change towards neo-liberalism launched in the 1990s, the governmental actor

intersect the style of thoughts we talked about with the one of international institutions,

rendering the women in these groups as agents for the implementation of this new

economic rationale. Not only this assumption leads to this risk, but we will see in the

coming passages that government programs aiming at increasing democratic

participation, social development, etc... are adding more responsibilities to women,

rendering them as unpaid civil servants.

4.1.2.Self-Help Groups as public policy instruments.

As we have seen in the previous section, self-help groups have been an essential

and main part of the government‟s strategy to enhance social development and well being

through a participatory approach in which self-help groups are at the same time the target

and vehicles of this scheme. However, it is useful to ask: is this an element contributing

to building the capacities of these women, hence give them power, i.e. empowering them

(we shall examine this concept in the second part of our first chapter) as NGOs and

government claim or are self-help groups an alternative way to implement public policies

in a cost-free manner?

Besides the fact that the self-help groups are called upon in order to encourage

women to participate in local governance through running to elections at the village level

in order make the constitutional reforms we spoke about earlier more effective and better

20

implemented, these groups of women are also the vector through which the government

communicates its programs25

. Hence, the government devolves the responsibility of

informing the local populations about the new schemes created in their favor to the self-

help groups. What lies behind this logic is that government institutions for local

governance are characterized by corruption and redtapism and have proved to be

inefficient. Therefore following the rationale of participation and decentralization dictates

that in order to implement the programs, the government has to rely on community based

organizations to render the application of the schemes more efficient since through this

devolution of responsibilities people will feel more involved and therefore will adopt the

programs with less resistance due to the assumed absence of corruption when self-help

groups women are responsible for this task26

.

Women in self-help groups do not only serve as an information vector for the

local populations to which they belong, but also they conduct work deemed under the

umbrella of community development. In a matter of fact, the now-dominant paradigm in

the development work and strategy concentrates heavily on community development

contrary to development by itself. This shift in vision implies that the community

development is the one which has a participatory approach instead of the implementation

of projects by the central government without the agreement of the people in the locality

involved. Hence, participation means that the local populations have to be involved in

every part of the process, starting from planning to implementation27

.

25

Guérin, I., & Palier, J. (2005). General Introduction. In I. Guérin, & J. Palier, Microfinance Challenges:

Empowerment or Disempowerment of the poor? (pp. 15-35). Pondichérry: Institut Français de Pondichérry.

26 Harper, M. (2002). Self-help Groups and Grameen Bank Groups: What are the Differences. In T. Fisher,

& M. Sriram, Beyond Micro-Credit: Putting Development Back into Micro-Finance (pp. 169-198). New

Delhi: Vistaar Publications.

27 During our stay in India, this concept of participation and its importance as well as involving the

community in every step of implementing the project was at the center of the community development

courses we took. This approach is called a bottom-up approach as opposed to the top-down approach that

was being implemented before through government development programs.

21

This approach as we said claims to give power to women, however in the name of

this very principle, women in the self-help groups are assigned tasks relating to public

works in development that is normally an integral part of the government‟s function.

From what follows, we observe in many areas that self-help groups are conducting

programs that were formally the responsibility of the government. Hence in the name of

community development, women are called upon and mobilize in order to conduct some

tasks like: cleaning the locality‟s roads as well as the village school; building

infrastructure like bridges in order to be connected to other localities; launching adult

literacy programs; launching hygiene and sanitation campaigns in their localities, assist

the government in immunization campaigns, and many more sorts of works. In Hoskote

village that I visited during my field work, the self-help groups have started a community

center in which after school lessons were given to the children as well as a sanitary center

for people to be treated28

.

Self-Help groups also held the function of public providers of goods: for example,

in the 10 districts of Preambalur, ten self-help groups have been identified in order to

provide food for the canteens in schools as well as other things with relation to public

utilities. Moreover, every year, self-help groups are assigned to organize celebrations and

events in the international day for women held in March of every year29

. This day is

usually used as an opportunity to conduct community development programs, thus these

women are the first to be mobilized for such events and to have community development

initiatives. Moreover, most self-help groups, like the ones I visited in the rural

surrounding of the city of Bangalore, are mobilized for maintenance work in their

communities such as cleaning water reserves, or management of common resources in

the community.

28

Bali Swain, R. (2007). Can Microfinance Empower Women? Self-Help Groups in India. In A. Dialogue,

Microfinance and Gender: New Contributions to an Old Issue (pp. 61-83). Luxembourg.

29 Guérin, I. & Palier, J. (2005). Op. cit.

22

Many more community projects are taken up by the self-help groups, moreover

these initiatives are considered as voluntary effort by these women who are seen as

enthusiastic to perform them in order to advance in the community and to assert

themselves. Therefore we observe here that those women are taking the role of

government officers and civil servants who were formerly conducting these tasks, but the

only difference is that they are performing this work for free. Thus we see that the

government through the self-help groups is slowly withdrawing from its role as a

provider of social services and maintaining infrastructure in these areas by delegating

them to these women who are made the agents of development, this is done in the name

of empowerment and participation. Through this procedure the government is getting out

of the public arena, thus obeying to the newly adopted logic of neo-liberalism by cutting

on public expenditures and applying the principle that people ought to help themselves

rather than being provided assistance by local authorities.

The women in self-help groups are therefore mobilized according to this logic and

principles, by conducting the tasks we spoke about in the above paragraphs they are

adding up to their responsibilities and burdens. Women have become not only the bearers

of the difficult task to ensure the well being of the household through getting credit by the

intermediary of self-help groups, but also they became the main and most important

actors in enhancing the well being of their localities. As we will see in the following

passages, even the productive work they are performing through acquiring credit from the

self-help groups are burdening up their livelihood, hence the community development

work is added up to their laborious day. Once again, the style of thoughts circulated to

these women is essential to the work of self-help groups as well as to the perceptions of

themselves as holding the duty to provide service for the community.

In fact, many researchers in the field argue that self-help groups under a neo-

liberal economic regime not only add up to the burdens of the women involved, but they

also accentuate their exploitation by the local and global capital in the framework of the

23

current economic system. Mohanakumar and Susan George30

in a study in villages from

the southern state of Kerala showed evidence about the phenomenon mentioned in the

above lines. They studied the effect of the policies of a government devoted to applying

neo-liberal economic principles in enhancing self-help groups, those principles were set

by the World Bank. The two researchers showed that the government was in tune with

the directives of the World Bank by increasing the strictness with regards to allotting

fund to the self-help groups. Hence groups who had women who were not under poverty

line were excluded from funds. This distinction and demarcation between self-help

groups “has gone a long way in crippling the effective functioning of self-help groups. In

fact, this clause in the decentralized planning process led to the disintegration of self-help

groups and micro –enterprises”31

.

Moreover, the authors note that as a result of following the neo-liberal agenda,

bureaucrats replaced social activists who were “the major driving force in organizing

women for self-help groups and micro-enterprises” 32

which suppressed the elements of

participation in the process of decentralization. Moreover, this new logic has lead to the

increase of burdens on these women‟s shoulders, and also accentuating their exploitation.

The study shows through the example of a self-help group engaged in a micro-enterprise

for producing umbrellas: a woman would work more than 10 hours a day in order to

make 5 umbrellas, and the price of umbrella was valued at 105 rupees while the women

were paid a wage of 25 rupees a day. These women were originally engaged in

agricultural labor, hence the move towards a micro-enterprise was supposed to boost their

income. Nevertheless the agricultural laborer earned 120 rupees which is 6 times more

than in the umbrella business. Therefore through this example, we can see how women

exploitation is being accentuated under a neo-liberal regime.

30

Mohanakumar, S., & Susan George, S. (2005). Micro Enterprises of Self-Help Groups and State Policies

under a Neo-Liberal Regime: Evidences From a Village in Kerala. In I. Gérin, & J. Palier, Microfinance

Challenges: Empowerment or Disempowerment of the Poor? (pp. 97-113). Pondichérry: Institut Français

de Pondichérry.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

24

When following the framework of analysis we spoke about above, self-help

groups who are inscribed under the microfinance movement are a way to provide the

poor with credit, hence they become credit worthy. This follows the international

institutions and donors‟ paradigm, like the World Bank. Therefore self-help groups

become a strategy to minimize the role of the state in the provision of basic services and

at the same time transform women into entrepreneurs in order to have a hosting

environment for investment and production. like the researchers mentioned above, by

taking the example of the state of Kerala, we can go as far as saying that the self-help

groups have been an innovative device in the hands of global donors, and capital holder

in order to restore an exploitation of the type of the nineteenth century as observed with

the difference between the wage of women and the price of one umbrella produced.

Hence women are being overburdened and their wage labor exploited in the name of

giving them more power and capabilities33

.

The logic mentioned above aims at turning women in self-help groups as

entrepreneurs, able to prove and demonstrate that they are financially disciplined in order

to be accorded loans. The paradigm and framework through which the self-help groups

are formed and functioning is circulation a certain style of thoughts to these women by

introducing the concepts of financial discipline, entrepreneurship, etc... However, while

the government is devolving responsibilities to self-help groups and withdrawing from

the provision of social services, the NGOs are in the front line of this project and the

main holders of this style of thoughts. In the following pages we will take our analysis to

the next important actor with regard to our subject of research, NGOs.

33

Ibid.

25

4.2. NGOs as agents of empowerment or vehicles of a style

of thoughts?

In our second part of this chapter we will be dealing with another essential agent

in initiating, forming and shaping the self-help groups, non-governmental organizations.

As we have seen in the previous section, the government withdrawal strategy is coupled

with its reliance on NGOs who are put in the front line of development work. These

actors are now the most important holders of the self-help groups project and it is

unavoidable to examine their work and logic. In the following passages we will first

examine the assumptions that the NGOs hold of women in order to make them the main

stakeholders in their project, through them affecting the women themselves. Then we will

examine the concept of empowerment that has become the key concept in the

development work. The concept was adopted in a very early stage by NGOs and put it at

the center of their philosophy and action. Therefore we will try to see how this concept

found its way in order to be used in this orthodox matter as the magic solution to poverty

alleviation, and we will observe which style of thoughts is disseminated through the

panacea of empowerment.

4.2.1.Why NGOs chose women?

The overwhelming majority of self-help groups are composed of women, there

are some men self-help groups but not as widespread and praised as those constituted of

women. Men are not deemed suitable for this scheme because many of the men groups

have failed and the actors involved in forming them have given up on targeting them.

Women self-help groups have been very successful and praised by governments, NGOs,

donor agencies and international organizations like the United Nations and the World

Bank. Therefore it would be essential to ponder about this phenomenon, and to ask

ourselves about the assumptions that these actors hold while targeting women.

26

Non-governmental organizations share some of the perceptions that the

government hold about the self-help groups. Some of these perceptions that we have

already talked above are that self-help groups stem from a democratic logic, that is

increasing participation in local governance through a decentralization process. The other

reason we have mentioned is that discrimination against women is an obstacle to

economic growth since they are prevented from contributing to the economy through

productive work. Nevertheless, NGOs have other reasons behind targeting women. We

will go through them in the following passages.

The assumptions behind concentrating on women through self help groups can be

categorized into two sections. One contains substantial approaches and the second

contains instrumental approaches. In the substantial approaches one can find the problem

of feminization of poverty, as well as the feminist argumentation laying its foundation on

a human rights perspective: when dealing with the phenomenon of the feminization of

poverty, we consider the fact that women are observed to be among the poorest of the

poor, adding to that they suffer from a high degree of vulnerability. Therefore when

regarding their situation, their aid is a priority for non-governmental organizations as they

are the most underprivileged amongst the poor. For NGOs, this reason seems too

obvious, and helping women is taken for granted. For that matter, when I interviewed Mr.

Bino Thomas, the field coordinator in the Center of Social Action (the NGO I dealt with),

I asked him about the reason underlying the targeting of women. When answering, he

drew up a list of discriminations that women suffer in India ranging from the dowry

system34

to employment and education. Targeting women is an obvious issue that the

question never arises for these organizations and for social workers or students of social

work with whom I have taken courses during my stay in India.

34

The dowry system governs marriage in India, especially among Hindus. In fact the family of the

husband demands a dowry from the bride‟s family as a condition for marriage. A dowry can be an amount

of money, land or other valuable assets. The dowry value differs according to the social status and caste of

the bride and husband. It is a big issue as many women can‟t be married because they don‟t have the

amount, or they get killed by their husband who continues to demand more dowry even after marriage. The

dowry is prohibited in the Indian law but still govern marriages.

27

As for the feminist view which has its source from a human fundamental rights‟

perspective. It considers that women should have access to their basic rights. From this

point of view, women‟s access to credit will be an opening and will pave the way for

them to gain more power (empowerment) in their environment35

. Many NGOs like

SEWA (Self-Employed Women Association), which is one of the main promoters of

microfinance and main advancer of women‟s rights in India through economic means36

,

put forward explicitly the use of microfinance through self-help groups in order to fight

for their independence, autonomy and women‟s rights. Again, when talking to Mr.

Thomas from CSA (Center for Social Action), I asked him about the logic behind

grouping these women into groups in order to acquire credit and have some savings. The

answer I got was that when women save and have access to more credit, they will be able

to increase their income through starting enterprises or any other economic activity

thanks to the increase access to credit in with affordable interest rate37

. Hence, the

increase of income and the fact that they are organized will enhance their bargaining

power with respect to their surrounding environment (community and household) but

also with respect to local authorities, thus they will be able to advance their demands and

achieve a certain autonomy and independence.

The above perceptions were given on the side of the substantial approach, as for

the instrumental approach we also have two views shared by NGOs. The first we have

35

Mayoux, L. (2000). Micro-finance and the empowerment of women - A review of the key issues. Geneva:

ILO Social Finance Unit.

36 Self-Employed Women Association. (2009). Retrieved August 27, 2009, from SEWA:

http://www.sewa.org/About_Us.asp

37 Before self-help groups, women and men used to take loans from local money lenders who charge

colossal interest rate that could amount to 50% of the loan. When taking loans from self-help groups

women are subject to an interest rate of 1 or 2%. Self-help groups are seen as a way for women to escape

from the domination of informal money lenders. However, even with this scheme women continue to take

loans from money lenders who now prefer women because of their creditworthiness showed through the

self-help groups, and women continue to take out loans from these lenders (reference). Hence many critics

accuse the self-help groups of feminizing debts.

28

already exposed when we were dealing with the governmental actor: it deals with the

concern of economic growth, i.e. women discrimination hinders economic growth, and

thus women are targeted by the self-help group scheme because they also channel their

increase of income to the household. In a matter of fact, the self-help groups initiated by

the CSA consider women not as their final target group: when speaking with field

workers and coordinators, they told me that their final target group is children: they have

the belief that through the increase of women income, more resources will be channeled

to the children, hence resulting in better clothing, and education especially for the girls.

The second logic that inscribes to the instrumental approach to targeting women

through self-help groups stems from a financial rationale since this scheme is primarily

concerned with savings and credit. In a matter of fact, it is assumed that women are more

cooperative; they tend to honor and respect their commitments, hence they are better at

repaying their debts. In another word, women are “good” borrowers, financially

disciplined and take their repayments seriously (unlike men, according to the non-

governmental organizations. This is an important, if not a major factor behind targeting

women in this new microfinance scheme since the bulk of it is based on finance and

credit. Hence women are deemed to be more credit worthy. NGOs tend to associate this

factor with enabling empowerment to women: they argue that financial discipline is

essential to economic empowerment hence expanding individual choice. Moreover,

international donor agencies will give funds for NGOs who succeed to initiate financially

sustainable groups which requires that women don‟t squander their money around, and

require an accepting audience rather than resilient and resistant38

.

Some critiques of this perspective advance the argument that NGOs target women

only for their financial discipline and have the assumption that “women are easier to

manage and mobilize and are less argumentative”39

. These critiques asses that contrary to

38

Palier, J. (2005). Op. cit.

39 Deshmukh-Ranadive, J. (2004). Women’s Self-help Groups in Andhra Pradesh: Participatory.

Washington: World Bank.

29

their openly declared intentions and objectives of social change through forming the self-

help groups, NGOs and donor agencies are in fact exploiting the situation of these

women and the vulnerability they suffer from. Therefore instead giving these women

power and expanding their capabilities, these external actors are enhancing and enforcing

women‟s weak and disadvantaged position in society. Hence, while NGOs claim that

their aim is to give voice to these women, they are basing their action and assumptions on

the fact that these women don‟t “have voice”, and only because to this factor that self-

help groups can be formed because it would be easier to teach women financial

discipline. Therefore, NGOs gave up on men because they presented less discipline,

acceptance and manageability: men have an advantaged position relatively to women;

therefore it is not easy to tell them “what to do” and “how to do it”. Following this

critical perspective, NGOs are accused to have become financial intermediaries40

, i.e.

mere tools to channel credit from banks to the self-help groups rather than motors and

promoters of social change41

.

Other critics accuse that the concentration on women by NGOs through the

formation of self-help groups contribute to neglecting other underprivileged and

disadvantaged groups like Scheduled Castes, Scheduled tribes and Other Backward

Castes. Hence putting women in the front picture contributed to moving these groups

who were historically disadvantaged to the margin of government and NGOs programs

despite the fact that they are as needy as women and such projects are crucial for their

well being and social advancement. Moreover, self-help groups for women tend to pin

point women against men: S. Rabindranathan argues that “self-help groups today focus

only on issues related to women empowerment with the hypothesis that men would

40

Marius-Gnanou, K. (2003, September 22-23). Pratiques économiques solidaires en Inde rurale :

l‟exemple des Self Help Groups (groupes solidaires féminins de microfinance) et impacts en termes

d‟empowerment. Presented at Congrès du réseau Asie .

41 As we shall see later, especially with the CSA, many self-help groups don‟t conduct collective social

actions in the sense that they don‟t do community work. And their activity is only concentrated on savings

and giving out loans. Hence in the meetings women only discuss financial matters. In this sense, NGOs

who foster these groups are limited to being financial intermediaries and not actors for social change.

30

always oppose or discourage the empowerment of women”. Through this logic of

targeting only women, NGOs contribute to forming a group based solidarity between

these women, this collective approach may thus result in the accentuation of gender and

caste inequalities42

. Moreover, the exclusion of men may have the risk of increasing or

creating tensions inside the household or the neighborhood and village.

These perceptions underpinning targeting women by NGOs through the self help

groups will help us understand more how these assumptions (regardless of whether they

are true or not) held affect women in self-help groups and the way of action they

undertake. These assumptions have the ability to shape women, and to transform them in

order to fit them. NGOs while targeting women follow the rhetoric of “helping women to

help themselves”, hence implying that these women are unable to help themselves by

themselves. In the next section we will look into the tools used by these NGOs to “help

women help themselves”.

4.2.2.What is behind the concept of empowerment?

When examining self-help groups, looking into the concept of empowerment is

crucial and inevitable since it became the main concept behind the work of non-

governmental organizations. During the courses I took in Christ University in Bangalore

while I was in the master of Social Work43

, it is obvious and clear that the term

empowerment is the key and imposing term in community development work. It is the

42

Rabindranathan, S. (2005). Historical analysis of empowerment and its present understanding in the

context of microfinance. In I. Guérin, & J. Palier, Microfinance Challenges: Empowerment or

Disempowerment of the Poor? (pp. 89-97). Pondichérry: Institut Français de Pondichérry.

43 I was taking part in an exchange program between my university in Paris, University of Pars-Dauphine

and Christ University in Bangalore. In Bangalore I was in the Master of Social Work in which I took

community development courses.

31

driving concept behind forming self-help groups, donor agencies‟ grants, and government

promotion of microfinance. Again, when interviewing Mr. Bino James from CSA I asked

him about the objective of self-help groups, he didn‟t have to think much before

answering: the objective is to empower women through credit. In the following pages we

will examine the concept of empowerment and what it implies; moreover we will try to

find out the link between self-help groups and empowerment.

The concept of empowerment is generally treated through the frame of thoughts

of the Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen. In his book,

“Development as freedom”44

, Sen views poverty as the lack of capabilities and choices,

thus it is not a matter of material assets or absence of rights. Thus Sen advocates

empowerment as the expansion of the capabilities of the disadvantaged individuals, hence

permitting them to make choices and exercise their rights. This implies a gain of power,

taking power, the view that Sen holds can be qualified as neutral since an empowered

individual gains more power through building capabilities, and this gain is not on the

detriment of anybody else. Sen‟s work has become very influential in the development

discourse as it was even adopted by the World Bank.

In fact, in elaborating the new development paradigm, the international

organizations have taken Sen‟s approach in order to define empowerment in the frame of

the “comprehensive development” (World Bank, 2009)promoted in order to have a

different discourse that redefines poverty and stresses on the human fundamental rights.

Therefore the World Bank defines empowerment as: “the process of increasing the

capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into

desired actions and outcomes. Central to this process are actions which both build

individual and collective assets, and improve the efficiency and fairness of the

44

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford University Press.

32

organizational and institutional context which govern the use of these assets”45

. This

definition echoes Sen‟s perspective, when it comes to concretizing the concept of

empowerment; these organizations put the emphasis on building and having a stable

environment for individuals to exercise their rights and choices. And more often,

empowerment is understood as the emancipation of women from the domination of

traditional institutions that are the reason for their disadvantaged position within

society46

.

A more radical view is held by the Indian sociologist Andre Beteille who has

become an authority when speaking on the concept of empowerment. Beteille argues that

“empowerment is about social transformation; it is about radical social transformation;

and it is about the people – ordinary, common people, rather than politicians, experts and

other socially or culturally advantaged persons”47

. Thus, “empowerment is a means to an

end and end by itself”. Therefore empowerment is about enforcing unenforced rights and

providing economic security. Beteille inserts empowerment in the Indian contexts, as it is

a path to overcome the constraints put by the traditional hierarchal institutions and to

achieve a certain egalitarian society based on civility rather than caste48

. Moreover

empowerment holds a dimension of power; Beteille argues that is a renegotiation and

redistribution of power and also a change in social values. Implicit behind this definition

is that empowerment is taking power from the privileged in order to give to the

disempowered, i.e. the underprivileged which implies a conflictual process49

.

45

World Bank. (2009). Empowerment - Overview. Retrieved August 20, 2009, from The World Bank:

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTEMPOWERMENT/0,,con

tentMDK:20272299~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:486411,00.html

46 Palier, J. (2005). Op. cit.

47 Beteille, A. (1999). Op. cit.

48 This vision refers to what we mentioned in the part where we talked about the government‟s motivations

in forming self help groups, and one of them is to overcome the contradiction between a hierarchical caste

society and a constitution devoted to equality. Thus self-help groups are the platforms for forming

citizenship that will transcend caste belonging.

49 Beteille, A (1999). Op. cit.

33

Sen and Beteille present two currents dealing with this concept. In a matter of

fact, empowerment is about power and changing power relations which have different

dimensions; some of them can be considered neutral (non-conflictual) and others

conflictual. Let us examine them: the first dimension would be “power over”, this implies

that power exists in a limited quantity, and involves a relationship of domination and

subordination, therefore, more power one party has, less power the others party has which

means that empowerment is a conflictual process. The second dimension is the “power

to” which is the kind of power that enables having decision-making authority, power to

overcome obstacles and solve problems. This refers to the individual aspect of power; it

relates to expanding intellectual and economic capacities through accessing, controlling

and using the means of production50

, this vision is in line with Sen‟s perspective. The

third dimension of power is the “power with” which refers to the political and social

power. It is the collective dimension of power, it involves organization, collective

solidarity, lobbying for rights and bargaining with the authorities. It assumes that people

having a common vision and interest will regroup in order to advance their demands51

.

The fourth and last dimension of power is the “power within” which refers to self-

confidence, self-awareness and assertiveness 52

and to self-image and psychological

force. This aspect is related to individual empowerment, the one which is felt by the

person alone which results in self-respect and the respect of others.

The question remains whether empowerment means taking power from someone

(a zero-sum game) or just increasing one‟s power (a win-win situation). According to the

dimensions we have exposed above, the interpretations may vary. Parson Talcott 53

50

This aspect has to do directly with microfinance, and the lending and saving schemes in the self-help

groups.

51 This aspect is very important to understand the logic behind moving microfinance from individual

lending to a collective one through self-help groups and to scale up the action towards social and political

purposes.

52 Rabindranathan, S. (2005). Op. cit.

53 Parsons, T. (1963). On the Concept of Political Power. Proceedings of the American Philosophical

Society.

34

argues that power is not necessarily what some have over others, but it could be a

resource to be utilized by a community as whole in order to attain its aspirations. Here

power is compared to the wealth of a nation, thus a nation‟s wealth can be increased

without decreasing the wealth of another. The same goes for power: one can gain power

without taking it from others. This seems the logic of NGOs when initiating self-help

groups. In fact, NGOs adhere to the paradigm set by international donor agencies like the

World Bank since they depend from them in order to acquire funds; it is an upward

accountability that rules the relationship between the two parties54

.

International Organizations concentrate on the dimension “power with” in a sense

that they accord importance to creating organizations (such as the self-help groups) in a

stable environment or participating in the existing organizations (like the Panchayati Raj

Institutions) instead of questioning them55

. Therefore the emphasis is placed on civil

society, increasing power in a neutral and non-conflictual way and once again what

“good governance” (another key word used by the World Bank to grant aids and

implement development projects in developing countries) is recommended when it comes

to organizations. Another side of this interpretation of empowerment is the expansion of

individual capacities in order to effectively act in an environment with limited resources

hence empowerment comes in a context to able individuals, precisely women to compete

over scarce resources. Therefore for the World Bank, self-help groups should be

empowered, gain power but from nobody as a stable environment should be available for

everyone to exercise their rights.

This dimension of empowerment doesn‟t seek to challenge the existing social

structure through self-help groups but only wishes to create entrepreneurs able to exercise

their activity in a hospitable environment. In fact many have critiqued this notion of

empowerment that the NGOs have adhered to. These organizations are dependent on

54

Kilby, P. (2006). Accountability for Empowerment: Dilemmas Facing Non-Governmental Organizations.

World Development , 34 (6), 951–963.

55 Palier, J. (2005). Op. cit.

35

donor agencies, and fund are not allotted to every NGO working with women self-help

groups, these organizations are subject to criteria that determine their selections by

international donors. Therefore NGOs must conform to the standards set by donors who

rely on professionalism, good governance, and above all financial sustainability of the

self-help groups and not their commitment to radical activism. Therefore NGOs would

prefer groups with a high financial profile rather than groups with high social activism

profile56

.

This notion of empowerment coupled with the praise of self-help groups has

moved to the margin many historical movements who struggled for rights for

underprivileged in India57

, ranging from Dalit58

movements to women movements.

Therefore NGOs and self-help groups have de-politicized the struggle of women and

disadvantaged categories of society in India 59

. Thus, through the infiltration of “the neo-

liberal agenda of restructuring state, civil society, whittled down to a depoliticized sphere

of NGOs, is seen as a cheaper and more efficient alternative to the state. This redefined

domain of civil society excludes political struggles and challenges to state power. Instead

it is seen as a sphere of market friendly institutions and service delivery agents outside

and independent of the state”60

.

Moreover, self-help groups are praised to be a good model of a participatory

bottom-up approach, nevertheless this is not very obvious. One reason is stated above

which refers to the dependence of NGOs on donor agencies who have their own agenda

regardless of the needs of the group. This increasing dependency on donor agencies

questions the premises that the NGOs claim to have while working with self-help groups,

56

Hofmann, E., & Marius-Gnanou, K. (2004). Op. cit.

57 Rabindranathan, S. (2005). Op. cit.

58 Dalits are the formerly untouchable castes in the Indian caste system. Since untouchably was abolished

by the Indian constitutions, they are now called Dalits.

59 As we have seen before, self-help groups became an extension of government to provide social services.

This hinders their role as actors involved in social change. NGOs don‟t question the government or local

authorities since they provide the institutional environment for flourishing self-help groups.

60 Randeria, S. (1999). Op. cit.

36

which is the bottom-up approach, which implies that projects are formulated according to

the needs of the women through a process of participation that enables them to be

involved in every step of the project. However, due to their need to funds, NGOs holds

themselves accountable only to donor agencies, and not to their constituents (downward

accountability) which questions their democratic claims61

. Moreover, NGOs have their

own predetermined programs and services to self-help groups without negotiating them

or assessing the needs of the women62

. Thus through this angle NGOs are perceived as

mere vehicles of dominant interests embodied in international organizations like the

World Bank who seek to advance the their logic amongst those sections of society who

are at the margin of the market63

. Therefore microfinance can insert the poor into the

financial economic system from which they have been excluded for a long time.

One issue remains: why create groups in order to empower? One of the power

dimensions is the “power with”: organizations which are seen as a crucial component of

empowerment. Organization is perceived as the most powerful tool to give power to the

disadvantaged or oppressed who lack influence; it is at the heart of democracy and

participation. Organization gives leverage to people with little wealth, social prestige or

political influence64

. However, the question is: why didn‟t these women organize

themselves? When I asked Mr James he immediately replied that poor women lack

education, awareness and knowledge, therefore they are not aware of the virtues of

organization which means that they will not organize themselves. In a matter of fact,

chronic poverty is usually associated with the lack of education, capital, social status and

61

Kilby, P. (2006). Op. cit.

62 When I went to visit CSA initiated self-help groups in the slums of Bangalore. The field workers were

explaining to the women in these groups a waste management program to be implemented in the slums.

Therefore they were communicating the information for the women in order to implement the project.

These projects are often suggested by NGOs and are marketed to women without their explicit demand.

This puts in doubt the bottom-up claim by NGOs

63 Jakimow, T., & Kilby, P. (2006). Empowering Women: A Critique of the Blueprint for Self-help Groups

in India. Indian Journal of Gender Studies , 13 (3), 375-400.

64 Otis, M. (2005). Re-Imagining Civil Society in India. Rhode Island: Brown University Providence.

37

many important assets. Therefore, when it comes to group formation they are structurally

weak because they don‟t have enough assets and are not able to productive contribution

to maintain their organization65

, the result is that even when they try to organize

themselves the attempt will not be sustainable66

. Here comes the role of NGOs in

inserting these women in a logic of organization by giving them enough assets through

the credit scheme for them to be empowered. As the term suggests, an individual cannot

empower herself rather she is empowered. Therefore we observe that empowerment has

to be externally induced, the NGOs empowers the women67

. One can argue that the

empowerers (NGOs) hold power over the empowered (women) that may alter her

attitudes and perceptions.

After having examined the concept of empowerment and what are the

implications it holds on the self-help group enterprise we still have to study the effect that

the NGOs have on the functioning of self-help groups. In fact, the repercussions of the

use of empowerment in the development projects differ according the context and the

actors involved in promoting it. As we have seen in the previous pages, empowerment

may uphold a project of radical change which put forward by radical activists in order to

alter the power structure in society in the favor of the disadvantaged. However when

international donors as the World Bank enter into the picture, and NGOs give more

important to upward accountability (towards the donors) rather than downwards (towards

self-help groups), the concept of empowerment will be stripped of its radical change. As

a result the ambition becomes having a stable environment for exercising rights and

65

This also refers to Olson‟s theory about collective action which we will discuss in the second chapter.

Olson argues that if the organization doesn‟t produce enough collective goods, and more importantly none

collective goods for its members in order to compensate for the cost of the collective action, the

organization cannot sustain itself.

66 Thorp, R., Stewart, F., & Heyer, A. (2005). When and How Far is Group Formation a Route Out of

Chronic Poverty. World Development , 33 (6), 907-920.

67 Batliwala, S. (1994). Meaning of Empowerment: New Concepts Form Action. In G. Sen, A. Germaine,

& L. Chen, Populations Policies Reconsidered: Health Empowerment and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.

38

starting micro-enterprise projects, empowerment is used as a neutral concept and as a

vehicle to the international institutions‟ (as the World Bank) style of thoughts seeking to

depoliticize the public sphere, and to minimize the role of government and attenuate

social change. Despite the above, self-help groups have succeeded in some way in

helping the women renegotiate their power and their position within their environment

and households and paved the ground for creating and expanding spaces 68

for women in

order to realize and conduct their collective endeavor as we will see later on in our

research.

In the following chapter we will see more concretely how this style of thoughts

affects women and self-help groups. And we will examine the women groups themselves

in order to understand their functioning as a small group according to Mancur Olson‟s

typology.

68

Deshmukh-Ranadive, J. (2005). Can Microfinance Empower Women. In I. Guérin, & J. Palier,

Microfinance Challenges: Empowerment or Disempowerment of the poor? (pp. 113-121). Pondichérry:

Institut Français de Pondichérry.

39

5. Chapter 2: Self-Help Groups and the Logic of Collective

Action

In the previous chapter we have tried to examine two external actors who are the

holders of the self-help group project. In a matter of fact, in order to understand the

functioning of the groups we had to study NGOs and the government promoting them.

Our research question or enquiry lies in grasping the way and logic through which these

groups undertake their actions and sustain their organization as we argue that they obey

to Olson‟s theory about collective action and groups. Therefore, investigating the

premises, assumptions, objectives and representation that the external actors have of the

self-help groups is essential. That is why in the first part of this chapter we will argue that

NGOs and government through the representations they have of these groups, and

through the guidance they provide to them are circulating a specific style of thoughts to

these women reinforcing the mechanism that Olson spoke about in demonstrating his

theory. Then in the second part we concretely expose how Olson‟s theory of groups is

being applied through the self-help groups which is combined with the Gandhian

tradition of solidarity and duty in conduction collective action

5.1. Why does Olson’s theory apply to self-help groups?

Through women self-help groups, NGOs and government are shaping the

women‟s style of thoughts and creating new realities which made possible a certain

collective action through these groups and helped maintaining organizations in these

disadvantaged areas. This style of thoughts circulated has paved the way for

methodological individualism reasoning for these women where the cost-analysis

calculations apply. These factors support our premise that the self-help groups are a direct

application of Mancur Olson‟s theory about collective action and groups, and the fact

these they are small groups will not have any effect on our reasoning or on the validity of

40

the theory even though Olson himself asserted that the mechanisms he explained in his

book only apply to large, latent groups and not to small groups due to their size, thus they

follow different mechanism which are not treated in his book.

5.1.1. How through self-help groups NGOs and government

are shaping the women’s style of thoughts.

While dealing with external actors we have mentioned that the international

institutions “style of thoughts” is being circulated to the women in self-help groups, and

we have briefly explained the concept. In the next pages we will develop this point as

well as elaborate more on the notion of “style of thoughts”.

In her book “how institutions think” 69

, the anthropologist Marry Douglas seeks to

understand how institutions function and in which way they condition the individual‟s

life and cognition. She adopts a program that she calls the “Durkheim-Fleck program” as

her theoretical framework for her argumentation. In elaborating this program, Douglas

couples the French sociologist Durkheim‟s epistemological sociology and the German

philosopher Fleck‟s philosophy. Durkheim examines the relationship between the

individual and the society, and he conceptualized a possible conflict between these two

parties as the struggle of antagonistic forces inside the individual. As a matter of fact,

Durkheim argues that the individual thinking has a social origin; the logic, the

representation, and the classifications that the individual has is given to him by the

society. Through this frame of thoughts the French sociologist sought to explain

solidarity in society: in a primitive society solidarity is based on the sacred, and in an

industrial society solidarity is based on the market70

. When it comes to Fleck, he doesn‟t

make such distinctions, but he goes further than Durkheim when analyzing the social

69

All this paragraph on the chapter 1 “Institutions don‟t have a brain” of Douglas‟ book

70 We will avoid making such distinctions while dealing with self-help groups as it is not obvious to make

this kind of classifications, society‟s structure is more complex and is not clear-cut.

41

group. He introduces several concepts as the “world of thoughts” and its “style of

thoughts” which governs the perceptions and forms and produces knowledge. Fleck

views the style of thoughts as the condition of existence of cognition and provides the

frame and defines the limit of every judgment held on the objective reality. Its main

characteristic is that it is invisible to the members of the world of thoughts. As Fleck puts

it: “the individual belonging to this world is never conscience of the dominant style of

thoughts, which exercises always an absolute hold over his thoughts from which it is

impossible to discard”71

. The style of thoughts is sovereign over the thinking being as the

collective representations are in the primitive cultures.

Mary Douglas combines the works of Fleck and Durkheim in her reasoning, as

she says: “Sometimes it will be fleck and other times it will be Durkheim who will

provide the better answers. Fighting as allies, back to back, each can compensate the

weakness of the other by his own force”72

. Through this Fleck-Durkheim program,

Douglas will seek in her book to find out to what extent the thoughts of individuals

depend from the institutions. Following this line of thoughts, we will take the Durkheim-

Fleck program, and more precisely the concepts advanced by Fleck in order to show that

NGOs and international donor organizations like the World Bank, and the government

adhere to a certain world of thoughts and through the self-help groups they are circulating

their style of thoughts. Therefore, these external actors and women self-help groups are to

a certain extent governed by certain social and economic institutions which govern and

shape their thoughts. In the following pages we will trace the effect that self-help groups

have on women.

As we have already said, self-help groups in the Indian context73

are primarily a

microfinance scheme, i.e. they seek to insert the poor and especially women in the

71

Fleck, L. (1935). The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. University of Chicago Press. Cited

in Douglas, M. (1986). How Institutions Think. New York: Syracuse University Press.

72 Douglas, M. (1986). Op. cit. p.45

73 We say Indian context because the concept of self-help is originally western, and it didn‟t start as a

credit program but as a group of individuals sharing the same grievances gather around and talk about their

personal experience in order to help themselves and provide help to each other.

42

financial system from which they have been excluded. Thus, in the first place it is a

project to provide women access to credit away from the local money lenders in order to

enhance their well being. In order to provide these groups with an important amount of

credit, NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development) launched the

self-help group – bank linkages, and as its name applies, it aims at linking the groups to

commercial banks in order to acquire a considerable amount of money in addition to the

weekly savings that these women conduct74

. And in order to give credit the banks

demand a guarantee from NGOs that these women will repay the debt as there is no

collateral involved while taking the loan. Therefore, NGOs conduct trainings for these

women on how to manage the money, how to have a check book in order to record the

savings, and provide them with guidelines for their internal functioning (we will deal

with that more in the second part of this chapter); in short women have to demonstrate

financial discipline.

As a matter of fact, while searching for literature about the sustainability of self-

help groups, the bulk, if not the totality of what was found deals with sustainability as a

matter of finance and not organization. This is because most NGOs working with self-

help groups concentrate on financial sustainability rather real empowerment and

collective action which is due to the dependence on donor agencies that make sure that

the women access credit and make “good” use of it. Thus, financially disciplining the

women is essential by circulating the international institutions‟ style of thoughts which

advocates for a productive spending of the credit and high repayment rate which is

assumed to lead to empowerment as women learn how to balance a check book, keep

track of their expenditures and mostly become entrepreneurs. Purushothaman 75

notes that

increased self-efficacy enabled a „curiosity in entrepreneurship‟, and confidence to

pursue economic activities While interviewing the self-help groups initiated by the CSA

in a Bangalore slum, I came to know that these groups are limited to savings and loans

74

Reddy, C., & Manak, S. (2005, October). Self-Help Groups: A Keystone of Microfinance in India.

Hyderabad: APMAS.

75 Purushothaman, S. (1998). The Empowerment of Women in India: Grassroots Women’s Networks and

the State. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

43

and don‟t conduct any activities outside the frame of credit, and still the field

coordinators of CSA were proud that some groups have sustained themselves for 9 years.

The concentration on credit and entrepreneurship alters the mindset of these women and

circulates a certain style of thoughts based on an economic rationality of a cost benefit

calculation: while interviewing a woman in a sangha76

in the same slum, she told me that

they don‟t allow rich women to enter because rich people only save and don‟t take loans.

This statement is extremely expressive of the phenomenon we are trying to explain.

Moreover, the term self-help appears to be ambiguous as it has a double meaning:

self-help as an individualistic endeavor which means that the individual will be

independent from others and she will be responsible for getting herself out of poverty, in

short self-helping oneself. Nevertheless, self-help can be a collective endeavor where

women gather around a solidarity feeling through which they can help themselves

collectively to overcome poverty and the constraints hindering their aspirations.

Promoters of self-help groups claim to pursue the collective sense of self-help, however,

in the same time we see that many groups are only based on credit and NGOs and

government attract members through offering more loans than in other self-help groups.

In fact, many women I interviewed told me that they joined the CSA self-help groups

because they offer more credit than other NGO self-help groups as well as sponsoring

their children education. Some women left their original self-help groups in order to join

the CSA ones for the very same reason. Thus, we can say that there is the promotion of

the individual self-help, individual initiative which is in line with neo-liberalism. S.

Rabindranathan argues that self-help groups “though they appear to be collective, often

lack this spirit, as their members are more concerned about personal gain, rather than a

common purpose”77

. These factors contributed to the success of the self-help groups and

fulfilled the assumption we already mentioned that women, unlike men, have financial

discipline. This does not mean that the assumption was indeed true but it might have been

self-fulfilled, one thing is for sure: NGOs and government are training these women in

76

The local appellation of self-help groups

77 Rabindranathan, S. (2005). Op. cit. p.95

44

order to conform to the logic of the international institutions‟ paradigm without which

microfinance would not be successful.

The initiation of self-help groups has had the effect of feminization of social

action 78

in order to orient it towards specific feminine issues and claims such as domestic

violence, fighting male alcoholism and other issues of women concern. Moreover, self-

help groups have helped creating new spaces for women as they were confined to their

households, they didn‟t have ownership over the public space which was not their domain

before the introduction of self-help groups. When interviewing the women in a Bangalore

slum or in the rural area of Hoskote, I asked the women whether they knew each other or

whether they interacted or helped each other before the self-help groups. Most of the

women had a negative answer, and when it was positive there was little interaction.

Moreover women in slums often cumulate work, they clean several houses, thus they

don‟t have much time to socialize and they attend the self-help groups during their thirty

minutes break. Therefore, self-help groups did not only create new affinities and social

networks between these women but also expanded the physical space for these women as

attending the meetings is necessary otherwise there will be sanctions. The space was

expanded also to local governance bodies like the Gram Vikas where women started to

attend the meetings and even run for elections which were not the social norm before

self-help groups79

.

NGOs and government affect women in the ways we spoke about through

circulating a certain style of thoughts making them apt to the methodological

individualism reasoning. They have trained them to be financially disciplined in order to

have a good performance to attract credit from banks This by circulating a certain style of

thoughts “where rights and responsibilities are equally valued and internalized, and

78

Guérin, I. & Palier, J. (2005). Op. cit.

79 Viswanath, V. (1993). NGOs and Women’s Development in Rural South India: A Comparative Analysis.

New Delhi: Vistaar Publications.

45

where sanctions are imposed and accepted”80

as MYRADA81

inscribes in its guidelines.

The attitude of individual self-help and independence is promoted which goes along with

entrepreneurship and private initiative. These facts have made possible the success of

self-help groups as savings and credit groups which have created new spaces allowed for

these women. This allowed them to gather, meet, and interact and to constitute a certain

group feeling through which collective action is rendered possible.

The NGOs and government have contributed to the sustainability of these groups

through the self-help groups-bank linkages by means of providing them enough credit.

This credit, according to Olson‟s theory, allowed for the benefits of organization will

exceed its cost82

through a series of mechanism which we will talk about later. However,

according to Olson‟s typology, these groups remain small therefore the mechanisms that

apply to them might differ from the ones that apply to important and latent groups. In the

following pages we will try to show with the aid of Douglas‟ work that the scale of the

group doesn‟t really matter, hence the mechanism of large groups apply to small ones

too.

5.1.2.Does group size matter?

The CSA, as Mr. James explained to me, seeks to organize these women into self-

help groups based on the belief that women have a common interest which is saving

80

MYRADA. (2002). Impact of Self Help Groups (Group Processes) on the Social/Empowerment Status of

Women Members in Southern India. Paper presented at the seminar on SHG–Bank Linkage Programme.

New Delhi.

81 MYRADA is an NGO based in Karnataka state in southern India. This NGO was the pioneer in starting

women self-help groups in India and it is the model that many NGO follow for forming self-help groups.

82 Refer to the section about empowerment where we explained why is it difficult for the poor to organize

themselves without external assistance as they don‟t have enough capital and asset for the benefit of

organization to exceed its cost.

46

money in a common pool in order to acquire credit. However women need these external

actors because they are unconscious of their common interest. We have stated this

assumption many times in our paper, but does the sole existence of a common interest

sufficient for organization and conducting collective actions? This is the question through

which Olson is trying to answer through his book “The Logic of Collective Action”83

.

His answer is clear: if we assume that individuals are rational and they “seek to maximize

their personal welfare, they will not84

act to advance their common or group objectives

unless there is coercion to force them to do so, or unless some separate incentive, distinct

from the achievement of the common or group interest, is offered to the member of the

group individually in the condition that they help bear the costs or burdens involved in

the achievement of the group objectives.” 85

However Olson explicitly mentioned that this

holds true for large or latent economic groups. He argues that small groups have a more

complicated situation where there may be voluntary action in order to advance the

group‟s common interest without any need of coercion. Hence Olson analyses small

groups in a brief matter compared to large groups to which he devotes most of his book.

Through the aid of Douglas‟s critique of Olson we will try to show that the same

mechanisms that apply to large groups will apply to small groups.

Olson tried to avoid including small groups in the mechanisms of coercion and

selective incentives to which large groups succumb. This may derive from a certain

perspective of a small group as comparing it to a romanticized community 86

where

collective endeavor can be pursued without any difficulties. Despite the fact that Olson

insists on the individual as being self-interested and rational, when speaking about small

groups he is more or less hesitant regarding this assumption as he states that individuals

might provide a collective good because of kinship, friendship or other social relationship

that might exercise a sort of social and psychological pressure on the individual without

83

Olson, M.. (1965). Op. cit.

84 The emphasis is by Olson himself.

85 Ibid. p.2

86 In a sense that community has durable bonds, based on personal relationships, a strong sense of

solidarity, and working unselfishly for the common good. It is not to say that Olson adheres to this vision

that might seem naïve, but it may underline some of his assumptions about small groups.

47

needing any sort of coercion or selective incentives. Moreover because these groups are

small therefore they have interpersonal relationships, they know each other more,

therefore they can engage in organization and collective action without any of the

mechanisms we talked about above. That is why Olson calls these groups as privileged

relatively to large groups who cannot function without these mechanisms.

Douglas critiques this avoidance of Olson to deal with small groups and attempts

to extend his theory to these groups, thus she attempts to “venture into the forbidden city

[of small groups and communities]”87

. She takes an anthropological approach through

understanding how communities are formed and maintained, she assumes that they are a

small group and not latent according to Olson‟s typology. She argues that “from an

anthropological perspective, the factors relating to cooperation have little to do with the

group scale”88

.

She refutes the claim that the smallness of size enhances mutual trust which

constitutes the base for a community, thus organizations that have not their origins in the

individual profit are founded on mutual trust such as communities. This factor is at the

basis of praise of primitive pre-colonial communities who are seen as peaceful and easy

to subjugate 89

as it was assumed that they didn‟t have the sense of profit, or utility

maximization at the individual level, therefore everything was motivated by the fact that

they are serving the community. That was how these communities were portrayed as

different from the colonizers who knew profit maximizing and were more rationale and

applying a cost-benefit calculation in the work they conducted. Douglas shows that even

these micro-communities were not different from the people who colonized them. “These

small societies, she says, were neither stable nor auto regulated, but in perpetual

reconstruction under the effect of negotiations and rational bargaining.” 90

She concludes

that the individual cost-benefit analysis perfectly applies to the micro-exchanges that

occur for the primitives as well for the modern man.

87

Douglas M. (1986). Op. cit. p.55

88 Ibid. p.60

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid. p.61

48

Through her analysis, Douglas has succeeded to reject the “touching illusion, the

idea of a utopian anarchist community”91

. She demonstrated that the smallness of the size

doesn‟t justify Olson‟s precaution and avoidance to deal with them as easily persuaded to

conduct collective action because of their size. Therefore, through her anthropological

analysis Douglas contributed to Olson‟ theory about groups and collective action as she

showed that the same mechanisms that apply to large latent groups apply to small groups

also that are not immune to the individualistic cost-analysis benefit. As we see, the

analysis of larger and latent group logic can thus be expanded to include small groups

that were left out by Olson. From here we can take our analysis to self-help groups that

can be considered as groups of small size according to Olson‟s typology, therefore we

can say that the mechanisms we spoke about for larger groups also apply for them.

Despite this valuable contribution by Douglas to Olson‟s theory, we still believe

that Olson‟s distinction between different group sizes is relevant in the context of

analyzing the logic and functioning of the women self-help groups. In a matter of fact,

Olson makes another distinction amongst small groups, as he named two types within this

category: privileged and intermediate. The first type is a group where each or someone of

the members “has an incentive to see that the collective good is provided, even if he has

to bear the full burden of providing it himself”92

. Therefore obtaining the collective good

doesn‟t require any organization or coordination whatsoever. An intermediate group is a

group where no member has sufficient benefit to give him incentive in order for him to

provide the collective good by himself. However this group will not have “so many

members that no one member will notice whether any other member is or is not helping

to provide a collective good”93

. When having an intermediary type of groups, the

collective good is only obtained through coordination and organization.

This distinction is very useful for our purpose as it opens a possibility for the

some small groups, precisely intermediate ones, to be dealt with in a similar manner than

the large groups. However Olson restates later on his original assumption which is that

91

Ibid. p.60

92 Olson, M. (1965). Op. cit. p46

93 Ibid. p.50

49

small groups, unlike large ones, have an incentive to see that it does not fail, for this

reason any means of coercion or selective incentives are necessary. As Olson affirmed,

small groups might have other mechanism that can influence the initiation of organization

and collective action which might range from social pressure, interpersonal character of

the group. Moreover there is more interest in providing the collective good because

unlike large groups, the effort of members of small groups has more perceivable impact

and they can reap more benefits out of the provision of the collective good.

If the above were true, then self-helps groups (considered as a small group of 15

to 20 women) would function from the moment that women become aware that they all

have an incentive for the group to be sustained. But it is not necessary the case since even

the oldest self-help groups still function on the bases of coercions and selective incentives

as we will see in the next section. In this context, Douglas‟ contribution is of important

value when analyzing the functioning of women self-help groups. Therefore we extend

Olson‟s reasoning of self-help groups beyond the realm of the inherent advantages of

small groups as being composed of individuals who interact with each other.

This said, we find it essential to mention that we refrain from taking Douglas‟

position as asserting that group size doesn‟t matter. We argue that group size does matter

to a certain extent as we will see with the case of self-help groups. These groups combine

the coercion and selective incentive mechanisms used by large groups and the initial

advantages of small groups in order to render their collective action possible. The self-

help groups might be classified as small intermediate groups according to Olson‟s

typology hence mixing mechanisms from both types of groups. In the next sections we

will show how these mechanisms operate in a more concrete manner in the functioning of

self-help groups. Therefore, exposing the effects (we spoke about in the previous section)

that NGOs and government have on women in order to render the mechanisms of

coercion, selective incentives and social pressure work effectively in the self-help groups.

50

5.2. Collective action in self-help groups: an “Olsonian”

methodological individualism ingrained in the

Gandhian tradition.

In this last chapter of our research, for the first section we will try to demonstrate

concretely how self-help groups obey in a very direct way to Olson‟s methodological

individualism embodied in the theory of collective action and groups. As we argued

earlier, women self-help groups present a combination of the mechanisms of latent,

important groups and the properties of small groups. However, we will see in the second

section that self-help groups are not just a mere concretization of Olson‟s theory, but

other factors enter into consideration which will have an outcome as a collective action.

These factors transcend the methodological individualism assumptions underlying

Olson‟s findings, but rather find their roots in the Ghandian philosophy and traditions of

duty and solidarity in the village context.

5.2.1. Self-help groups: a combination of mechanisms

governing latent groups and the properties of small

groups

First, it is important to mention that there no ambiguity in applying Olson‟s theory

of collective action since these groups are at first economic groups that seek to make

these women better off through access to credit. Moreover, Olson affirmed in his book

that large groups don‟t function without selective incentives and coercion because an

individual‟s effort is not noticeable to the group. Therefore a rational individual will not

contribute to the production of the collective good since he would anyway benefit from

this group, thus an individual needs to be provided by the group with non-collective

goods, and ought to be coerced in order to contribute, and otherwise collective action will

51

not occur. This, according to Olson, might not be applicable to small groups due to the

reasons we spoke about in the previous section.

However, women self-help groups are considered to be small groups, the

individual effort of each member highly influences the group: the group is formed of 15

to 20 women, it accumulates capital through the small weekly amount that each woman

has to put in the group common pool, this presents a small amount of capital that women

can borrow from but not sufficient in order to increase their income and acquire means of

production. Therefore, the group goes to seek loans from commercial banks that could

lend it an important amount of money in order to able the women to achieve their

economic aspirations. In order to access such credit from banks, the group has to

demonstrate a certain financial discipline which means that the weekly savings are

regular, the group succeeds in preventing the default of loans, and they should be able to

have viable projects. Once the credit is given by the bank, the group decides in which

way it will be allotted to the different members according to their needs. From the above

we can clearly see how the effort of each member is crucial to the group and can be easily

noticeable. Thus take the example of a woman who doesn‟t contribute to the weekly

savings, hence affecting the capital of the group, or she defaults from repaying her loan

which might lead to the default of the whole group from repaying the loan back to the

bank. These actions affect the general performance of the group and its financial

credibility resulting in the refusal of the bank to give out loans again, thus the group will

no more be providing the collective good because of which it was created which will

finally lead to the loss of its purpose.

The above scenario is not uncommon in women self-help groups as many women

default or refuse to pay the weekly saving amount, therefore the group will have to

compensate and pay the credit of the defaulter to the bank94

. The smallness of the size

alone of self-help groups doesn‟t really prevent these types of behaviors nor is it

sufficient to do so. That is why the external actors (NGOs and government), through

94

Many women I interviewed reported to me that they had to face this problem in their groups at a certain

time.

52

introducing bylaws and internal regulations95

, insure that the groups have financial

discipline through applying selective incentives and coercion in the self-help groups

which we will now examine. The main findings in this section will be based upon the

observations and interviews I made with the women in self-help groups in the city of

Bangalore.

Olson defines a selective incentive as the one “that operates, not indiscriminately,

like the collective good, upon the group as a whole, but rather selectively towards the

individuals in the group. The incentive must be “selective” so that those who do not join

the organization working for the group interest, […], can be treated differently from those

who do”96

. These incentives according to Olson can be either positive (in the form of

advantages and benefits for those who work for the group) or negative (in the form of

coercion for those who refuse to cooperate). These incentives are at the heart of the

functioning of self-help groups as they are an essential part of the motives behind their

members‟ commitment.

Interviewing the women in CSA self-help groups, the main question I asked them:

what is your motivation for joining the group? Many of the women said that their

motivation was acquiring credit in order to send their children to school or help her

husband to improve his business97

. Another reason underlying their participation was the

fact that the CSA offers a sponsorship program for the children of one of these women98

,

that means that the CSA will take care of the school fees as well as books and other

schooling materials for the children of the chosen woman. These are considered as

95

The CSA as the other NGOs, propose bylaws to the women self-help groups. That is done after a series

of trainings and workshop for these women in order to familiarize them with organization. The bylaws will

have regulations about how the meetings should be conducted, what is allowed and what is not, and how to

punish defaulters and those who don‟t abide by the group. It is a mechanism through which women

internalize the notions of financial discipline and organization.

96 Olson, M (1965). Op. cit. p.51

97 Most of the women in the slums didn‟t have their own business as they mostly worked in cleaning

houses; therefore they spent the day going around different houses in the area.

98 The sponsorship is on a rotating manner: the group decides at each time to the children of which women

goes the sponsorship.

53

positive selective incentives because clearly the women who are not in the organization

do not benefit from neither the credit allotted to the group nor the sponsorship program

for their children. Moreover, the government has modified one of his major subsidy

program in order to be allotted only to self-help groups: as a matter of fact, the SGSY99

(Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojna), a credit subsidy program for the poor was put in

place by the government to only benefit self-help groups100

.

In addition to that, in 2004 the government has launched the Entrepreneurship

Development Program through which individuals are provided trainings, thus 13 000

women have benefited from it, provided that they are self-help groups members101

.

Moreover, being a member of a self-help group can confer benefits from banks: for

instance, the Andra Bank in the state of Tamil Nadu has launched a credit card scheme

for self help groups so they could be able to withdraw up to 200,000 rupees in credit. The

woman holding this card can benefit from free insurance as well as scholarships for her

children102

. Many more of such positive material selective incentives can be cited. This

again shows how positive selective incentives can play an important role in the

motivations of these women in order to contribute to their share of producing the

collective good within the self-help group.

In addition to the above, self-help groups possess negative selective incentives

mechanisms that sanction non-cooperators. Non-cooperation can be in the form of not

contributing to the individual share of weekly savings, not participating in the weekly

meetings or defaulting the repayment of the loan taken by the group from the bank. When

I asked the women what would they do in such cases: they answered me that in the first

two cases they would put a fine for the non-cooperator. As for the third case, they would

confiscate some precious assets that the defaulting woman possesses until she repays the

loan, and in extreme cases, i.e. when the first method doesn‟t work, they would lock her

99

Refer to section 3.1.1. Self-help groups as an alternative development strategy.

100 Guérin, I. & Palier, J. (2005). Op. cit.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

54

in her house until she pays. The NGOs aid these women in resolving those conflicts as

they provide assistance, guiding and sometimes they will even directly interfere in the

affair. In extreme cases, the non-cooperating woman would be excluded from the group

and would be prohibited from entering any other group in her area as they are sponsored

by the same NGO. As we observe, these mechanisms of coercion are severe and serious

and might lead to the exclusion of the woman. In some self-help groups I visited the first

two cases of non-cooperation were more or less tolerated as there were no important

sanctions. However the third case which is more threatening to the sustainability of the

groups, as discussed in the earlier passages of this section, is not tolerated unless it is an

extreme case were the defaulter faces extreme problems related to family or business,

only then the group accepts the repayment of the loan on behalf of the concerned woman

without excluding her from the group.

As Olson made it clear, these selective incentives are not limited to material non-

collective goods but could also have a social status as prestige, social acceptance and

social status103

. These incentives play also an important role in attracting women towards

self-help groups. Another question I asked to the women I interviewed, was: describe for

me the difference in your life, besides credit, that you felt after joining the self-help

groups. I got a wide range of answers that refer to what Olson calls social selective

incentives: for instance some women said that they have become independent from their

husbands, others acquired a group of friends with whom she can share her problems with.

The main trend of answers I got from the women was that they gained peace, made new

friends, and most importantly they have more confidence in themselves. “Before I was

very scared from the people and now I became more confident, and I know about the

people and the group” Kushta told me. Therefore by joining self-help groups, women

have found a new space where they can nurture their personalities, and compensate for

the low self-esteem they had104

.

103

Olson, M. (1965). Op. cit.

104 Lahiri-Dutt, K., & Samanta, G. (2006). Constructing Social Capital: Self-Help Groups and Rural

Women‟s Development in India. Geographical Research , 44 (3), :285–295.

55

When I asked them how they recruit other members, they said that they talk to

their neighbors and friends and tell them about their experience in the group on the

financial level and the personal one. Moreover, self-help groups offer women the

opportunity to be involved in the local political life as the third of the Panchayti Raj seats

are reserved for women. Therefore, as self-help groups have become important actors in

their environment105

through the work they conduct for their communities, the women in

them have gained a social status and feel more able to run for the local elections, for

instance in 2001, 2,612 self-help group women were elected106

.

What were presented above are the selective incentives that would normally

operate for a large group but are not necessary for small groups according to Olson. Thus

we showed that these mechanisms perfectly apply to small economic groups like the self-

help groups that also have the advantages of small groups. Self-help groups are usually

constituted from women who more or less know each other, as we already said they

might have not interacted a lot but at least some women in the group know each other. As

many of the women said, one of the most important things they acquired from joining the

group was that they gained good friends, and even sisters. A major condition for the

success of the group is that there exist good interpersonal relationships between its

members. Therefore not contributing in the production of the collective good would lead

to a social burden, as in bad relationship with the members/friends. When a woman is not

contributing, the members talk to her and try to understand the reason behind the non-

cooperation. Sanctions are not immediate, but it is the peer pressure mechanism that

contributes to limiting the number of non-cooperators but it also helps in understanding

and containing them within the confines of the group. Moreover, many groups I met if

not most of them, have a very high attendance percentage, as not many women are absent

from the regular meetings. This is not only due to the fines that the absentee has to pay

but also because the weekly meetings provide women with an additional space away

105

Refer to section 3.1.1. and 3.1.2.

106 Guérin, I. & Palier, J. (2005). Op. cit.

56

from the household and work, and these spaces are used in order to share problems, build

affinities and as a refuge from the daily things that the women go through in their daily

life, therefore it can be considered as a space of socialization and network building.

We have showed that self-help groups are small groups that also use the same

mechanisms that large groups use in order to sustain their organization and the provision

of the collective good. However, one last distinction we have to make in order to follow

Olson‟s logic when analyzing groups. Olson distinguishes between two types of groups:

exclusive and inclusive. An exclusive or an inclusive group is relative to the nature of the

collective good provided. Therefore an exclusive group provides and exclusive good

which can is defined by Olson as the following: “because of the fixed and thus limited

amount of the benefit that can be derived from the collective good, which leads the

members of a group to attempt to reduce the size of their group, this sort of collective

good will here be called an “exclusive good”107

.Olson continues to say that by contrast to

exclusive goods, when “the supply of collective goods automatically expands when the

group expands when the group expands, this sort of public good should be called an

inclusive collective good”. From this definition we can conclude that women self-help

groups are also exclusive groups as they provide an exclusive collective good for its

members.

In a matter of fact as we have already précised, self-help groups acquire loans

from commercial banks; these loans present a considerable amount for these women.

However, not all women can get loans at the same time; it is based on a rotating principle

and on needs as well. I have participated in a several meetings of these groups, and in

them women who need loans from the group present their case, the group discusses them

and decides to which woman the loan will be given. Moreover, external actors forming

the groups intend not to have groups having more than twenty members for this reason,

and also for having the advantages of small groups as we have discussed earlier.

Therefore, expanding the group to more than twenty members will diminish the chances

for women to have the loans when they need it as there will be more competition when

107

Olson, M. (1965). Op. cit. p.43

57

presenting their cases. In addition to that, it is important to mention that not in every area

all women are in self-help groups as the NGOs and government do not initiate as many

groups to include all the women. When visiting the groups of CSA, I have noticed that

some women initiated their own groups without the help of the NGO. Nevertheless they

don‟t last and don‟t provide the same amount of the collective good as the NGO initiated

ones because banks don‟t give out loans without NGO or government support. We can

conclude that by their nature and scarcity self-help groups are exclusive groups.

In this section we have showed that self-help groups obey in a direct way to

Olson‟s theory and analysis of groups and collective action. Self-help groups maintain

themselves through several mechanisms of selective incentives according to which

women decide rationally whether to participate or not in the production of the collective

good, thus Olson‟s methodological individualism assumption applies. However, the

functioning of these groups is not de-rooted from the traditions of the environment they

live in neither from the historical continuation of such movements. In the next and last

section of our research we will explore the Gandhian dimension of the self-help groups.

5.2.2. Self-help groups: ingrained in the Gandhian

Philosophy.

Self-help groups emerged in the 1980s as a microfinance scheme; however the

concept of self-help or self- assertion movements isn‟t exactly new to the Indian social

movements108

. Let us briefly review those movements: in the year 1925, Periyar E.V.

Ramaswamy launched the Self-respecters Movement in the southern state of Tamil Nadu

based on the principle that all; sections in society should have equal rights to benefit from

the fruits of resources and development in the country, it also called for the abolishment

108

That is not to assert that the self-help group movement is a social movement. We are not undertaking

this kind of analysis of self-help groups, however it would be interesting to study them from the perspective

of social movements theories.

58

of the caste system109

. There was also the Gandhian movement (which we will examine

in more depth later on) that was generalized all over the country. The movement stressed

on the need of self-government by the citizens of India. He believed in “sarvodaya”

which means “everything for everyone. He called for decentralization at its maximum as

he believes that power corrupt, thus the country should be decentralized and ruled by

small non-hierarchical councils like the Panchayats. Later on in the 1940s there was the

Telengana Marxist movement which can be seen as a self-assertion movement with a

“thrust on claiming land rights by laborers in the context of the failure of the state to

protect their rights. Many other self-assertion movements emerged later on that ranged

from environmental movements, farmer movements and women movements struggling

against the sale of alcohol in the villages110

. We will not speak long about these

movements since they are not our interest in the present study. The only purpose was to

show that self-assertion movements are not an invention brought to India by NGO and

the international institutions like the World Bank but they belong to an Indian tradition.

However we argue that what influenced the self-help groups the most is the Gandhian

tradition of self-assertion.

The concept of self-help was largely popularized by Gandhian philosophy. As we

have already discussed, the notion of self-help is ambiguous and open for interpretation,

however in the Ghandian tradition the concept of self-help is implicitly mentioned in two

concepts which were the basis of the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. The first concept is

Swadeshi, which roughly means “self-reliance” which relates to the material concept of

self-sufficiency on all levels ( ranging from the individual to society), thus it means the

reliance on one‟s force111

. Some have translated this term in English to “endogenous

development, as Gandhi believed that only Swadeshi could create a community in its

truest sense which means that people could only truly develop as a community. “The

Gandhian dream bases its utopian hopes on the cultivation of certain Indian cultural

109

Rabindranathan, S. (2005). Op. cit.

110 Ibid.

111 Iyer, R. (1993). The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

59

essentials, taken to represent the deep and ancient values of Indian civilization”112

. This

vision engenders a collectively oriented society with an individuality ingrained in this

collectiveness.

The second concept used by Gandhi is the one of Swaraj which means self-rule.

In the Gandhian sense it means the emancipation of various forces of coercion, and

exploitation113

. The concept of self-rule was used in the context of resistance to the

British colonial rule and foreign imperialism as well as to castes and dominant classes.

According to the Mahatma‟s philosophy, self-determination and self-rule are not

synonymous with individualization. Personal development is perceived as a process not

to be separated or opposed to relationships of solidarity and cooperation. “This is one of

Gandhi‟s key concepts: that individual, community or national freedom is inseparable

from individual, community or national self-reliance.114

” Once again, the Gandhian

philosophy inserts the individual in his environment and community, and sees his/her

self-assertion, self-reliance in the context of the community and as an integral part of its

development as well and not in the opposition of collectiveness. In short it doesn‟t place

the individuality in the sense understood by Olson who ignores the social institutions

surrounding the individual as he thinks of organization as a sum of individuals and not as

a whole.

Ghandi sought to revive India‟s long history of justice and non-violence through

these two concepts that we spoke about: swadeshi (self-reliance) and swaraj (self-rule).

“He drew from a rich history tracing the percolation of Buddhist thought and assimilation

into an emergent Hindu faith out of the Vedic tradition”115

. Thus Gandhi thought and

envisioned a civil society based on the ancient tradition which is mainly based on dharma

(duty). In this view the citizen in the society of Gandhi is seen through the angle of the

community to which he is a part off. ”Citizenship in this view has more to do with a

112

Otis, M. (2005). Op. cit. p.67

113 Iyer, R. (1993). Op. cit.

114 Otis, M. (2005). Op. cit. p.71

115 Ibid. p.65

60

Citizen‟s responsibility than to do with rights defended by a centralized power”116

.

Therefore in this view Raghavan concludes that Gandhi‟s individualism finds its origin in

the concept of Dharma or natural obligation which was the reason behind holding

together the traditional communities in India117

.

As we see, the notions of self-help, self-reliance and governance are ingrained in

a long Indian tradition. Maybe it was this factor that helped self-help groups to flourish in

such a manner in India. The “self” concept reinserts the individual in his community and

environment which adds another dimension to the question “why is there collective

action amongst women self-help groups?” Therefore through this new perspective we

acquired through examining the Gandhian philosophy and tradition in Indian movements

we can add more insights to our findings. This fact pushes us to reexamine Olson‟s

reasoning concerning the individual and also Douglas‟ expansion of the theory to small

groups. This is not to say that the analysis of these two authors is invalid, but on the

contrary, inserting a Gandhian perspective permits us to add some relativism to our study.

Thus when examining the women self-help groups we are invited to examine the factors

of solidarity and duty that enter to question, and seeing the community as an essential and

indispensible element contributing to the empowerment of the individual. From this

angle we can understand the works that these women conduct for their village or

slums118

.

In her research work about self help groups, M. Otis encountered a woman who

expressed to her in her own words how the Gandhian tradition is influencing self-help

groups when she participated in an event organized by a local self-help group. When the

researcher asked the woman why she volunteered her time in order to contribute to the

116

Ibid. p.67

117 Iyer, R. (1986). The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi: Civilization, Politics and

Religion. Oxford: Clarendon.

118 These works we already spoke about in our first chapter when we were dealing with government and

NGOs. We observed that public services activities are being delegated to women such as cleaning roads,

communicating government campaigns and many other activities.

61

event, she answered: “It is our responsibility. If our sangha (self-help group) can help, it

is our duty to help.” Then when she was asked if she had ever participated in such events,

the woman replied: “No, I worked only for wages then”119

. Moreover, when I was

interviewing the women in the one of Bangalore slums, I had a recurrent question: “when

do you feel that you can quit the self-help group.” I expected to get an answer such as:

“when I get out of poverty”, “when I have enough money for the family business to

flourish”, that is answers that reflect the nature of the main collective good that the group

provides credit and saving. However all the answers I got were that none of these women

will ever quit the group because they want to help each other, because they have made

friends and sisters, and that they want to make this opportunity available for other poor

women. This also is a reflection of the influential Gandhian philosophy and tradition of

the Indian self-help groups, who might be seen as a way of concretizing Gandhi‟s vision.

This might be one of the key elements of the popularity of this scheme

119

Otis, M. (2005). Op. cit. p.63

62

6. Conclusion.

In our research we have tried to grasp the functioning of women self-help groups

in India. We have applied the Olsonian reasoning of groups and collective action on these

community based organizations. In order to do that, we have traced the path of these

groups from their conceptualization to their actual implementation. In a matter of fact in

order to arrive to the conclusion that Olson‟s theory of groups applies to self-help groups,

we had to analyze and study the main actors involved in promoting the self -help groups,

i.e. non-governmental organizations and government. The purpose of this examination

was in order to observe how these actors are shaping their target population making them

suitable for an Olsonian reasoning.

The different state governments and the central government of India have adopted

the self-help group project as the main tool for fighting poverty. It was seen as a way to

conciliate the contradiction between a highly unequal and hierarchical society structured

around the caste system and the egalitarian and democratic vocation of the post-

independence India embodied in its constitution that sought the abolishment of the caste

system towards a more just society. In that sense self-help groups were an instrument for

further decentralization and enhancing participation at the local level, therefore involving

who are considered as the most marginalized in the Indian society, i.e. women. Behind

targeting women, there underlies different assumptions that play a role in shaping them

through circulating a certain style of thoughts. However, women self-help groups, in the

name of empowerment and development, are conducting public service works such as

cleaning the roads, upgrading the neighborhood and communicating government

programs destined to the poorer populations. In short, they are doing the work that the

government once did; therefore the government is somehow instrumentalizing the self-

help groups in a way that they have become low paid public servants, they are used as

well for the government to withdraw from its responsibilities as a provider of public

goods.

63

The government withdrawal is coupled by the move of the NGOs to the forefront

of this project; they have become the main holders and promoters of the self-help group

scheme. These organization target specifically women since they have given up on men

self-help groups because they have failed. NGOs chose women due to several

representations that they have of them: they have different backgrounds, some of them

are substantial: they deal with the issue of the feminization of poverty, or they adopt a

feminist point of view by approaching the issue from the angle of fundamental rights

considering women‟s access to credit through self-help groups will empower them. There

is also the instrumental approach which contains an economic concern of including

women in the contribution in the growth of the country. The other reason lies in the

assumption that women are financially disciplined and tend to honor their debts more

than men. These assumptions tend to shape women in order to make them suitable for the

representations that these NGOs hold.

One of the main concepts used by NGOs when working with self-help groups, is

the one of empowerment. They claim that through self-help groups, women are being

empowered, i.e. they are gaining power in order to get out of poverty. The concept of

empowerment can hold different definitions, one which is neutral that doesn‟t intent to

change power structures, but only to build capacities. The other one is conflictual; it

implies that when the poor are empowered they take power from those who have it. The

international institutions like the World Bank, as well as NGOs seem to adopt the neutral

definition of empowerment. Through this logic, building capabilities implies acquiring

more credits, developing entrepreneurship and self-initiative. Through this approach to

empowerment, NGOs are circulation the style of thoughts of international institutions to

the women in self-help groups which affects self-help groups by rendering them apt to

the methodological individualism assumption adopted by Olson when analyzing groups.

Therefore in self-help groups, women also conduct a cost-benefit analysis to decide

whether to participate or not.

In our second chapter we have argued that despite their small number, women in

self-help groups obey directly to Olson‟s theory of groups and collective action. In a

matter of fact, through the support of Douglas‟ critique of Olson‟s exclusion of small

64

groups from his theory, we have succeeded in expanding Olson‟s analysis in order to

include small groups. Following the latter‟s typology, women self-help groups can be

classified as an intermediate group, which is a type of small groups. Therefore self-help

groups combine the mechanisms of coercion and selective incentives of large groups and

the advantages of small groups. Hence in order for the women to contribute in the

production of the collective good which is acquiring more credit for the women to take

out loans from, a series of mechanisms enter into consideration. Women are subject to

positive selective incentives which range from the possibility to get out loans from the

groups, health insurance, scholarships for their children. There are also social selective

incentives which are building relationships, having more self-esteem and confidence.

Nevertheless, there exist also coercion mechanisms for women who refuse to contribute

to the production of the collective good: these mechanisms range from paying fine, to

forcing a person to contribute through locking her in her house, and finally exclusion

from the group. Moreover these groups possess the advantages of small groups that

insure the production of the collective good through peer pressure, and through the

maintenance of strong social relationships which might lead to social exclusion in the

case of non-contribution to the production of the good.

Nevertheless, the logic of participation in self-help groups doesn‟t succumb only

to the methodological individualism logic but those groups are rooted in the Gandhian

philosophy and tradition. In fact, the Gandhian movement - which is highly influential in

the Indian society - had promoted the concepts of self-reliance and self-rule which

relocates the Indian individual back to his community. Those concepts promote the

development of the self through the development of society. In light of the Gandhian

input we spoke about, women engage in collective action from the logic of solidarity,

duty and obligation towards the society and not because of a mere cost-benefit

calculation the she conducts.

Self-help groups are highly dependent on NGOs as they provide them with the

bank linkage, but also through them funds are channeled in order to maintain the

activities that the groups initiate like health centre, crèche and other types of activities

that self-help groups conduct. Moreover NGOs intervene often in order to resolve

65

conflicts within the groups120

. Thus, for sustainability concerns, NGOs and governments

have started to form self-help groups federations. These federations regroup self-help

groups on the district level and may go beyond. Each group has two representatives in the

federation. These federations are created as a withdrawal strategy by the external actors,

as when they initiate self-help groups they don‟t intend to support them forever.

Therefore self-help groups federations are meant to replace NGOs and government in

order to insure sustainability for the groups that constitute them.

These federations will be responsible for creating self-help groups, getting funds,

and training. Thus they play the same role as NGOs and government, more importantly

they present a support for self-help groups, in the sense that women claims can be better

voiced and addressed on a larger level. Federations also make sure that there is a market

for the women in self-help groups to sell their products, and they offer many financial

services. Therefore it would be very useful to examine these federations, their potential in

strengthening the claim approach of self-help groups, and maybe move self-help groups

to another level, where women are the holders of their own projects rather than driven by

NGOs or government.

120

When interviewing the CSA field coordinator, she told me that they only intervene in the groups

matters when the issue is very serious, which questions the sustainability of self-help groups.

66

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Beteille, A. (1999, March 6-13). Empowerment. Economic and Political weekly .

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