ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the Narmata self-help group of Mendha Lekha village was one of the first in Gadchiroli district, Maharashtra to be sanctioned a credit and subsidy package under the Suvarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY). Introduced in 1999, SGSY is a major anti-poverty policy in India that aims to bring poor people above the poverty line by facilitating their self-employment in micro-enterprises, with an explicit focus on the formation of poor womens self-help groups. The failure of the Narmata self-help group to achieve the SGSY policy objective illustrates the discrepancy between the increased attention of anti-poverty policies to the empowerment of poor women in India, and the frequent failure of such policies to benefit poor, adivasi women in particular. The primary empirical basis for the production of the framework is a case study of the SGSY in India.