Women in India banding together to fulfill their dreams

Don't seek to merely get rid of

the negative things in your life.

Instead, transform their energy

into something of real positive value.

Ralph Marston

When Phulbasin Yadav and 11 other women set aside $3 a month to start a business, skeptical elders turned the town against them.

When Ms. Yadav learned to ride a bicycle, traveling between villages to set up health clinics and offer hot meals for children, her husband threw her out of the house, saying she was ignoring her duties at home.

Business in Sukuldhain, India had always been a man's world. But today, Yadav is president of a districtwide network of women's groups with businesses ranging from mines to concrete works -– totaling half a million dollars in assets. And, sometimes, when she comes home from a hard day at work, her husband has tea and a hot meal ready for her.

What has followed is essentially an entire subeconomy run exclusively by women who take loans from banks or the government to fund increasingly ambitious projects. In the village of Moher, five women's self-help groups manage and cultivate 116 acres of farmland that generated a $1,500 profit last year. In Dhaba, a dozen women in brightly colored saris mix cement – stirring the sludge with wooden-handled hoes and pouring in gravel that they balance delicately on their heads.

In short, they have done exactly what they were intended to do, says Dinesh Shrivastava, who championed the groups when he was district collector here several years ago. "Women are the best agents for social change," he says. "They have made a revolution."

But in rural India, where more traditional views of the roles of men and women still hold sway, change has not come easily.

"Because I was getting involved in work, my husband started beating me and saying I wasn't doing any work [at home]." He wanted the wife who had helped him as a cattle herd and served the family. Yadav decided she was no longer that person. "I said, 'What I am doing can help many people in the area.'"

So he threw her out of the house. For good measure, his father also threw out Yadav's mother-in-law, who was a member of the self-help group, too. Remembering nights spent sleeping outside, Radhia Bai can now manage a smile.

"I always felt that she was doing right," she says of her daughter-in-law.
So, too, did the government. There is a room in Yadav's house given entirely to plaques, commendations, and awards that she has won during the past six years. One included a gift of some $2,500 – a significant factor in her husband's decision to let Yadav back into the house.

"My husband understood that what I am doing is helping our family," she says. "Now he respects what I am doing.

The $2,500 is being used to help 35 local children pay their way through school, and now, when Yadav is out, her husband cooks and cares for their four children.