In poorest districts of Uttar Pradesh, 200 grain banks offer food security

Started by Kanpur's Shramik Bharti, these food centres work on a community model

On a humid morning in Jam­unipur, a small hamlet in Bhadohi in Uttar Pradesh, Meera Devi receives a sack of wheat. She weighs it and makes a laborious entry in a ledger filled with thumb­prints. “My neighbour had borrowed this grain during the second lockdown,” she explains as she empties the sack into a large steel vat. “Now that her husband has gone back to work, she has returned it with 25 per cent more grain as interest.”
 
Meera Devi is the manager of the Jamunipur grain bank. Set up in 2017, this grain bank with a capacity of 500 kg has been a source of food security for the entire community of Jamunipur. It has 50 members each of whom contributed two kilograms of wheat to join. Kanpur-based non-governmental organisation Shramik Bharti, which has spearheaded the concept, contributed 400 kg of wheat initially so that the bank could maintain a corpus of 500 kg. Members borrow up to 100 kg of food grain in times of need, and return it when they can.
 
With a mandate to improve the livelihoods of marginal farmers, the NGO has set up over 200 grain banks in five of Uttar Pradesh’s least developed districts with a combined storage capacity of more than 100 metric tonnes.
 
Before the pandemic, members mostly used the services of the grain bank when they had wedding or death feasts to host. However, the pandemic and the ensuing job losses and economic distress, made these grain banks invaluable tools to combat hunger and distress.

(Photo: Geetanjali Krishna)

Arti Devi is a carpet weaver in the neighbouring hamlet of Beeja­pur. Her husband, a labourer in Mumbai, was among the multitu­des who came home when the pan­­demic struck. “While we were relieved to see him home and safe, we worried how, with no income and extra mouths to feed, we were going to survive,” she says. “For the last two years, most of the men­folk have been unemployed and we’ve subsisted on the free ra­t­ions distributed by the government. But these haven’t been enough.”
 
The Beejapur grain bank has been a lifesaver for many members during this time, she says. Her neighbour, Photo Devi, agrees. Her husband and she are marginal farmers who have not had a good harvest since 2017 as their low-lying field keeps getting flooded. “The grain bank has ensured we have food to eat,” she says. Tara Devi, who manages this grain bank, says that during the lockdown, they loaned 3.48 quintals of food grain. Most of it has alre­ady been returned. “During the lockdown we even loaned grain to over 50 non-members,” she says. “With­out the bank, we might have all had to take loans simply to buy food.”

Rakesh Pandey, who heads Shramik Bharti, estimates that their food banks have ensured food security for 6,000-plus agricultural labourers and marginal farming families in rural UP. “It is a relatively easy model to replicate,” he says.
 
Each bank requires an initial outlay of about Rs 15,000 (excluding Shramik Bharti’s staff and administrative expenses), can be adapted to diverse food habits and can be easily managed by community members. Moreover, this type of self-governance gives beneficiaries a sense of being in control of their own well-being. Perhaps this is why, as Tara Devi comments, her grain bank rarely has defaulters.
 
Borrowers usually return within nine months, sometimes sooner, she says. “In fact, in all our grain banks, we have seen that members always return the grain they borrow as quickly as possible,” says Pandey. During the lockdown, they observed that some grain banks even supported the poor and needy households in the vicinity by giving them free grain. “Another grain bank earned so much grain in interest that the members decided to sell the excess grain to buy another storage vat,” he says.
 
Meanwhile, in Jamunipur, Meera Devi puts away the weighing scale and ledger after she has entered the returned loan. “None of us is very educated but running the grain bank is not hard for farmers like us who are used to weighing and storing grain,” she says. Someone from Shramik Bharti comes every week to help her maintain the ledger. The menfolk, she says, are getting ready to return to the city to work — assuming the third wave does not play spoilsport.
 
“Our lives are so precarious — one month your husband sends home a decent amount of money, or the harvest is good, and everyone in the family eats well,” Tara Devi muses. “The next month, if he doesn’t get enough work, or if unseasonal rains spoil the crop, there aren’t enough rotis for all of us to eat.”
 
She is happy that the grain bank has changed this. “It has taught me that food is our only security,” she says. “Food is the biggest capital in the world.”