Sreelatha Menon: Big surprise for that little wonder

EAR TO THE GROUND

An Andhra Pradesh microfinance scheme for pregnant women has managed to do what thousands of crores of rupees spent under the central government schemes failed to achieve

Can a state or a bank lease you a life? The Andhra Pradesh government and the banks that are financing its self-help groups do lend a life. They help babies to be born healthy and weighing better than their counterparts elsewhere, all for a micro-credit of Rs 9,000 which the state provides to its pregnant women.

The microfinance scheme comes with two meals a day in the community kitchens specially set up for pregnant women by self-help groups in about 317 villages in 22 districts.

Local officials are dismissive of supplementary nutrition provided by ‘anganwadis’ under the central government’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). “When a person is hungry, how can she get supplementary nutrition?” asks T Vijay Kumar, CEO of the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) set up by the state to manage its large federation of self-help groups.

The nutrition programme has been introduced by SERP as one of the interventions through the SHGs at the village level and is in the process of being scaled up.

The Village Organisation or the village-level federation of self-help groups, which is linked to local banks, identifies pregnant women who are needy, sets up a community kitchen and provide meals.

The cost of running the kitchen is met through the revolving fund of Rs 2.5 lakh per kitchen provided by the government to the Village Organisation. The cost of the two meals comes to Rs 25 per day. The supplementary  nutrition programme spends Rs 2.30 daily on a pregnant woman.

The women under the Andhra scheme can return the money in installments in the size and period decided by them. The installments can be as small as Rs 100 a month. The interest charged is 3 per cent, which is subsidised by the government.

Under ICDS, the needy persons are not guaranteed access, while under Janani Suraksha Yojana, a pregnant woman often gets the money for her expenses up to about Rs 1,500, months after her delivery. The Andhra microfinanced community kitchens dovetail with ICDS and Janani Suraksha Yojana.

So far, 1,221 babies have been born to beneficiaries, with 89 per cent of the mothers being fed for more than three months. The success rate of safe deliveries has been 100 per cent, with 93 per cent of them being in hospitals, and not a single baby weighing below 2.5 kg.

Vijay Kumar grins with joy as he reels out these numbers. “What is Rs 9,000 or Rs 10,000 for ensuring that the future of the state is healthy?” he asks. The Planning Commission and the Union health ministry are nodding in approval and are taking notes from him. So are many states like Maharashtra, Gujarat and of course the neighbours Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

“I tell the mothers that your child is free of poverty from birth,” says Kumar who has been there with the SERP for a decade now.

The ICDS and the National Rural Health Mission, which together target bringing down infant and maternal mortality rates are planning to incorporate lessons from the AP model into their strategies.

The average national maternal mortality rate is 300 per 100,000 with about 1,40,000 deaths annually, while the infant mortality rate is 57 deaths per 1,000 live births, despite about Rs 23,000 crore being spent under the National Rural Health Mission so far. (Infant mortality is 15 in Kerala and 7 in the US, while maternal mortality rate is 110 in Kerala and 13 in the US).

Will microfinance succeed where the government-funded schemes have failed?