Stories of hope from Tirunelveli countryside

Srinivasan Services Trust brings a change in the lives of rural people

TIRUNELVELI

Inside a hole-in-the-wall house in Ervadi village in remote Tirunelveli district, a group of women gather to showcase the products they sell ranging from hand-made art pieces to fancy blouses for women. They all belong to the Bismi Self-Help Group, one of the numerous such self-sustained women groups in the region, supported by the Srinivasan Services Trust, the social arm of TVS Motor Company. Thanks to the guidance and support of SST that Bismi today is a success story with all its members becoming entrepreneurs.

“It started as a small tailoring unit and none of us knew anything beyond the kitchen back then. We were guided by the volunteers from SST, who helped us get loans from banks and that’s how we set up the SHG. We practice micro lending amongst us and help each other. SST has also dissolved differences of religion and caste in these rural pockets,” says Mohammed Peer Banu, one of the members.

A few kilometres away from Ervadi is a village named Arasarkulam, where 45-year-old Dhanalakshmi and her flock of all-women workforce are busy under a tin-roof workshop, attached to Dhanalakshmi’s house. They are engaged in making of serial bulb sets. Two decades ago, only Dhanalakshmi’s husband was involved in the work and it was a male bastion, as the work was laborious. Then stepped in the volunteers of SST, encouraging the women to take it up.

“Today, I run a lucrative business and I am also able to support a dozen women from my village. I give them work and they also earn a livelihood,” says Dhanalakshmi, who now supplies serial bulb sets to various parts of Southern India. Elaborate and colourful bulb sets are sent fro festivals in temples and churches, public meetings and rallies by political parties and weddings.

The Trust has not only developed economically viable business models for these women but also has worked to improve infrastructure in the rural areas. Take for instance the Government higher secondary school in Kalakkad, where the Trust has constructed a toilet block for girl students that also houses a napkin incinerator. “After the construction of the toilet, the strength of girl students has gone up. Though there was a toilet block earlier, it was in a bad shape and we were scrambling for funds,” says P. Vijayalakshmi, the Headmistress of the school.

Similarly, SST has built toilet complexes for men and women at the Primary Health Centre in Moonanjipatti, serving thousands of people in the surroundings. “The PHC is equipped with a 20 bed post-parturition ward, where sufficient toilets were an absolute necessity. The Trust also brings people from various villages for regular health check up camps that we organise. They help us keep track and follow up on patients and their treatment,” says Dr. Karpagam, one of the duty doctors at the outpatient ward.

Srinivasan Services Trust with its office in Tirukkurungudi, the home turf of TVS group of companies, today serves over 5000 villages in all the southern states. In Tirunelveli, they also help out farmers by spreading awareness about the various schemes in the government and also get them for the farmers from the agriculture and agriculture engineering departments. For instance, the trust has helped in the desilting of an irrigation tank in Pappankulam village and with the good monsoon, the tanks now holds water that’s being used for agriculture.

The Tirukkurungudi office of the SST works in three panchayat unions of Cheranmahadevi, Kalakkad and Nanguneri that has 66 panchayats and 583 villages. They work with 451 SHGS in the area apart from many groups of farmers and rural homepreneurs, contributing to a socio-economic development in the countryside.

(The reporter was taken on a visit to some of the villages in Tirunelveli district by Srinivasan Services Trust)

EOM

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