Dr. Manoj Dash, Bhubaneswar, 25 December 2024
The ‘Subhadra Yojana’ (‘Yojana’ is Scheme in English) was a key promise in the BJP’s 2024 election manifesto in Odisha. It was a direct response to the BJD’s ‘Mission Shakti’ programme, which provided interest-free loans to women. The scheme is named after ‘Devi Subhadra’, the younger sister of Lord Jagannath and Lord Balabhadra. Together, the three deities hold tremendous cultural and emotional significance in Odisha and the BJP never shies away from leveraging cultural symbols to make political inroads and fulfil its objective to capture power by smartly exploiting people’s emotions.
In the past, the BJD had reaped rich political dividends by providing different types of financial products to the Women’s Self Help Groups (WSHGs) through ‘Mission Shakti’. When translated, ‘Shakti’ in Odia would mean ‘power’ in English. Whether ‘Mission Shakti’ was primarily meant to ensure women’s empowerment is debatable. But BJD’s mission to capture political power for a long period was successfully realised through WSHGs riding on the ‘Mission Shakti’ vehicle. What started as a small initiative to empower women later attained iconic status when it helped the BJD government return to power riding on the voting power of the WSHGs. The members of WSHGs paid back handsomely to the BJD in the shape of political power in exchange of the funds that the WSHGs could easily lay their hands on! At a point in time, it became politically so important to the BJD to ensure continuity in power that it had to place the ‘Mission Shakti’ in the ‘safe hands’ of the wife of V K Pandian, who used to manage the Naveen Patnaik government from a shady backroom.
The BJP was very well aware of this power treasure of WSHGs and the magic of ‘Mission Shakti’, which was instrumental in ensuring BJD’s return to power time and again. Therefore, it had to make a more alluring offer to the members of WSHGs than what was already on offer from the BJD. The clickbait helped the BJP to make quick inroads to this secure treasure of votes and assisted the party to capture power in Odisha.
After forming the government in Odisha, the BJP fulfilled its promise by declaring the ‘Subhadra Yojana’ as one of its flagship initiatives. The scheme aims at financially empowering women, improving their socio-economic status, and promoting their safety and well-being. However, it is not clear how all these objectives will be achieved by providing financial support of only 10,000 rupees annually in two separate instalments. In total, each beneficiary will receive 50,000 rupees in a span of five years.
The BJP government may make tall claims about the lofty objectives of the ‘Subhadra Yojana’, but in reality, the offer that was made in its election manifesto was meant to capture enough votes of women who were strong supporters of the BJD. It clearly helped the BJP to wean away women voters of Naveen Pattnaik’s party and that resulted in checkmating Naveen from returning to power for a record fifth term.
Coming back to the objectives of ‘Subhadra Yojana’, can 10,000 rupees alone help a woman start a business and make a decent living out of it? The answer is a clear no! So, how this paltry sum would help uplift the socio-economic status of women is open to anybody’s wild imagination. There are enough examples around the world that cash transfers are among the most popular methods for improving the socio-economic conditions of individuals of historically disadvantaged groups. However, when cash reaches women, are they able to spend it using their own decision-making power? Can a tiny amount of cash alone bring a perceptible difference in the socio-economic status of a woman? What about the skills to set up a business and run it profitably? Will men in the family ever allow a young woman to invest the amount in creating income generating assets?
Rather, sudden availability of cash makes women more vulnerable to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). If they don’t part with a portion of the cash readily available with them, women would have a tough time to spend it the way they wish. Moreover, even if one assumes that they are allowed to spend it for ensuring generation of regular income, do the women have access to expert guidance and hand-holding? Has the government bothered to provide the associated support system required to bring economic empowerment? Only when women wield enough economic power and gain control on decision making, will they remain safe! Once their economic status grows and safety is ensured, will their social status and well-being become perceptible.
Many research studies indicate that women want control over their earnings, they want fair and secure livelihoods, but the quantum of these transfers are not disruptive enough to ensure economic independence for women. In a deeply patriarchal society, for women to actually benefit from such schemes they would need systemic empowerment, continuous hand holding, suitable skilling, expert guidance and proactive support by people in the government. Giving a little bit of money here and there alone is not going to be of much help unless a well-designed support system is made available to them to set up successful and profitable micro-enterprises for generating adequate income over a considerable period of time.
The government does not have any baseline data on the socio-economic status of the beneficiaries of ‘Subhadra Yojana’. How will it be able to measure success of the scheme later? The erstwhile ‘Mission Shakti’ always made claims that more than 7 million women have been made self-reliant and many of them ran successful businesses. In reality, they were spoon-fed with government contracts to supply different material (e.g. school uniform) and services (mid-day meals) at the lower end of the value chain that brought them some income. Most of the WSHGs didn’t know what to do with the money that they received from the earlier government, which was provided as an incentive to ensure that they only vote for the party in power. Hence, there was no meaningful guidance ever available to empower women economically and socially. Since the real objective was never empowerment of women, no efforts were ever made to create an enabling ecosystem towards realizing it. Hence, most of the WSHGs were engaged in money lending that generated some income in the shape of interest.
Like its predecessor, the BJP government has not bothered to create an ecosystem that can indeed help women to get into setting up businesses and developing those into income generating ventures. The real objective is to keep women voters happy and remain entangled in the age-old patriarchal cobweb. Therefore, empowerment of women would remain a far cry unless women take the initiative to empower themselves! Needless to say, a BJP government is least expected to bother about empowering women because its ideology has not been aligned with placing real political power in the hands of women.
In the rural areas of Odisha, there are many stories that highlighted how men were resentful of the cash power flowing to their wives through the WSHGs, and many women often pointed out that they had little control over the money since they were not even allowed to step out of their homes without their husbands’ permission. The real problem of such interventions is that women have been conflated with ‘family’ and are considered merely an instrument to pursue social welfare. Unless women are considered as a distinct segment with specific requirements for their economic empowerment, their socio-economic well-being from interventions like ‘Subhadra Yojana’ are highly unlikely to be realised.
