Even the women described as "success stories" by the
government, say the Stree Swabhiman scheme has failed.
JALANDHAR,
Punjab—The much-hyped “Stree Swabhiman” central government scheme,
meant to simultaneously boost women’s incomes and improve their menstrual
health by training them to set up small-scale sanitary napkin manufacturing
units, has failed on both fronts.
Rather,
the scheme resulted in the production of poor quality sanitary pads that no one
wants, and has plunged scores of rural women in debt, thereby furthering their
financial precarity, HuffPost India has found. The scheme
targeted over 35,000 women who work as village-level entrepreneurs (VLEs)
under the Common Service centre (CSC) e-governance project of Ministry of
Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). According to the government,
the scheme has been implemented in over 178 districts in 23 states.
The
same women who have been used to advertise the success of the scheme say the
government’s claims are false, and the financial projections used to justify
the viability of the scheme are misplaced.
HuffPost
India spoke to the
women listed on the “Stree Swabhiman” scheme website maintained
by MEITY, and visited several such units in rural Punjab, to find that the
women touted as “success stories” were struggling to keep their businesses
running.
The
Stree Swabhiman scheme is illustrative of the Modi government’s failure to
fulfill the central promise of its 2014 campaign election campaign: meaningful
jobs for all. After the collapse of big-ticket programmes like “Make in
India”—which tried and failed to create millions of manufacturing jobs—and
policy missteps and outright blunders, like demonetisation, Prime Minister Modi
and his ministers have sought to present rural small-scale entrepreneurship
schemes such as “Stree Swabhiman” as an alternative to salaried employment.
But
by heedlessly promoting “entrepreneurship” without training or safety nets, the
Stree Swabhiman scheme reveals that the government is shifting the risks of job
creation onto those ill-equipped to bear them—like rural women.
“You
can’t teach people into becoming businessmen in a two or three-day training
session,” said Dr. Umesh Menon, a serial entrepreneur and former senior faculty
at the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India, Ahmedabad. “As an
entrepreneur, you need to be able to take risks, and if your basic needs are
not met, you cannot do that.”
“Forced
entrepreneurship programmes like these work as long as the subsidy is in place,
and fail the moment the reality of loan kicks in,” said Dr. Menon, who also
works as a consultant on entrepreneurship for the United Nations and World
Bank. “These women are then left high and dry with stock they cannot sell.”
False
case studies
Her
unit, the government claims, employs 15 women who produce 500-600 napkins a day
that they supply to “40-50 nearby villages”. Parameshwari’s unit was so
successful, the website claims, that “she organised sessions on ‘Pad Pe
Charcha’ to sensitise girls about menstrual hygiene and the health benefits of
using sanitary napkins.” (“Pad Pe Charcha” is a blatant reference to the
Bharatiya Janata Party’s Chai Pe Charcha national political
campaign.)
Yet
these claims, Parameshwari said, are far from the truth.
As
one of the first women to sign up to the scheme, Parameshwari told HuffPost
India, she got the manufacturing machines and one month’s supply of
raw materials for free—but is still struggling to earn a decent living from the
scheme.
Parameshwari
is also the founder of an NGO called SHINE which claims to work on raising
funds for menstrual hygiene, that adopted 100 girls to supply sanitary napkins
for a whole year and sought to raise donor funds to pay for these pads—in
theory, guaranteeing a ready market for their products.
Yet,
Parameshwari soon began to receive complaints about the poor quality of the
glue that binds various layers of the napkins. School girls also said the
napkins were uncomfortable and not properly absorbent.
“We
were initially supplied poor quality glue to paste different layers of
the napkins. The product began to receive numerous complaints from school girls
pertaining to spoiling of clothes,” Parameshwari told HuffPost India.
“Even though the quality was improved a few months ago, we cannot find many
buyers for the product.”
Out
of the nearly 11,000 sanitary packs (each pack has 8 napkins) made at her unit
over the past year and a half, Parameshwari could only sell 5,000 packets at a
profit of Rs 3 per pack—or a total profit of Rs 15,000.
While
the official portal of Stree Swabhiman claims that Parmeshwari has employed 15
women and is making 500-600 pads daily, she claims she has only employed five
women and is making between 10 and 20 pads in a day.
Flawed
finances
Even
if these numbers accurately reflected reality—which they don’t—the woman taking
on the substantial risk of setting up this unit, and paying four salaries, only
earns an annual salary of Rs 1,11,960, or about Rs 9,330 a month. For
comparison, the average monthly consumption expenditure nearly 7 years ago, in July 2012—the most
recent numbers available from the 68th round of the National Sample Survey—was
Rs 10,516 in urban areas, and Rs 5,750 in rural areas for a family of four.
Even the government schools are not willing to take
free samples from us as they too prefer branded napkins supplied to them free
of cost under CSR initiatives from the multinational companiesAnita
Rani, Jalandhar
In
actuality, things are even worse: the Stree Swabhiman scheme envisages a fixed
cost investment of Rs 1,75,000 to set up the machine, more than double the
estimates projected by the MSME Ministry. The cost of manufacturing per pad,
Parameshwari told HuffPost India, is closer to Rs 3 per pad—again,
double the MSME Ministry’s estimate—or about Rs 25 per pack of 8 napkins, which
she sells for Rs 28 per pack of 8 napkins.
The
lack of demand for her products has pushed Parameshwari to use her NGO to
crowdsource tax-deductible donations to fund her production of pads, which she
hopes to distribute for free.
In a
December 2018 appeal, published on a crowdfunding platform, Parameshwari’s
Shine NGO sought to raise Rs 1,00,000 to produce 5,000 sanitary packs to distribute for free to women in need. The cost of
manufacturing per pad, in Parameshwari’s project proposal published online, is
a startling Rs 28 per pad—of which her NGO will fund Rs 8, while the donations
will make up the remaining Rs 20.
Debt
traps
As a
woman in a rural area, Rani is entitled to a 35% subsidy on the scheme—or Rs
93,947—but that money is locked in a fixed deposit for a period of three years,
and will only be given to Rani if she can run her business for three years and
pay off the loan at an interest rate of 8.5% per year.
Yet
much like Parameshwari, Rani said it is hard for her for find a market for her
sanitary napkins, particularly now that menstrual health is a major target area
for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes of large multinational
companies.
“Even
the government schools are not willing to take free samples from us as they too
prefer branded napkins supplied to them free of cost under CSR initiatives from
the multinational companies,” Rani said. “Majority of the schools in my area
are already stuffed with a year-long supply of napkins for its girls.”
Also
she said that girls from poor families can still not afford it as the pads have
to be sold in a packing of 8 and not separately.
“I
will not be able to get the subsidiary amount until I repay my entire loan,”
said Rani, who has been running her business for three months now. She was
paying off her loan “with utmost difficulty.”
Government
inefficiencies
For
Behra, the biggest flaw in the scheme is the requirement that the women procure
all machinery and raw materials from the CSC that oversee the scheme on behalf
of the Union government.
“Recently,
the district coordinator supplied 20 quintals of wood pulp sheets claiming that
it is sufficient to make 50,000 pads,” Behra said. “It was only after two
months I came to know that it only made 37,000 pads.”
When
she raises the matter with her district coordinator, she was told that she
might have used more material than the required proportion.
“How
should we know as to whether we have used the material more than the proportion
or it was actually supplied less in quantity,” Behara said. “Even the trainers
who gave us training initially are untraceable. We have not received any
technical support thereafter,” said Behra who has reduced her manpower from 10
to five women due to less demand for the product.
“The
machines does not bear any name, manufacturer detail or any safety standard
mark over it,” Rani said. “Also, there are no prices listed on the raw material
packings or the address of the supplier.”
Chandigarh-based
Jaspal Singh, State coordinator for Punjab’s Common Service Centres, admitted
that his organisation had not provided any bills for the goods they provided.
“We
have informed her about the cost of machinery and raw material but if any VLE
wants detailed invoice of every machine, he should write to us,” Jaspal
told HuffPost India.
Wrong
product?
“For
sanitary napkins, the private sector players are quite strong with very strong
distribution networks,” said Dr. Menon, the entrepreneurship expert. “In this
case, the government has not offered proper extension support to these women.”
In
effect, the project is premised on the hope that tiny manufacturing units,
employing between five and ten women, will somehow compete for shelf space with
consumer giants such as Unilever and Procter & Gamble.
Arunachalam
Muruganantham, whose quest to manufacture cheap and safe sanitary pads inspired
the movie Pad Man, declined to comment specifically on the Stree
Swabhiman project. Muruganantham said he had not been consulted on the scheme,
but noted that such projects need a great degree of investment and support by
the government.
“The
governments across the world are known for having a ‘military’ approach towards
their citizens,” Muruganantham told HuffPost India. “Schemes like
‘Stree Swabhimaan’ need a ‘motherly’ approach, which the incumbent government
has failed to adopt.”
PS-
This article was originally published in HuffPost on 02/01/2019.
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