Most girls in Bakra village of Haryana didn’t study beyond Class 5, and those who did had to walk 5 km to get to the neighbouring Beri village to pursue their Class 10.
After that, the girls would get married and spend the rest of their lives tending to cattle, farm chores and their children.
Pooja Sharma, a native of the village, was one such girl. “I was born in the 80s and married at the age of 20. My parents did not allow me to pursue studies beyond Class 10 as it would require me to study in a co-ed institute. They weren’t comfortable with that thought,” she recalls.
Pooja married in 1999 and soon gave birth to two daughters and a son by 2004. However, the family started struggling financially, owing to increased expenses.
“My husband and I separated from our joint family, and he earned a meagre Rs 4,000 per month by working in agriculture. We did not want to move towards the city for employment opportunities as it would entail an increase in expenses,” she says.
So, the couple borrowed money from friends and family to buy an empty plot located in the outskirts of the village to live. “The plot was opposite a dilapidated mansion, about 300 years old. People believed it to be haunted and avoided passing that area. I had heard about some incidents describing the same. But I braved the situation as it was all we could afford,” she admits.
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Interestingly, a few years later, Pooja set up a manufacturing unit for making homemade cookies in the same “haunted house” that earns her lakhs and helps empower hundreds of women in the region.
Speaking about her life-changing journey Pooja says that to support her husband, she found a job with an NGO in 2008 and earned Rs 2,500 a month.
“In 2013, some officials from Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK) approached the villagers to offer lessons in sewing to provide livelihood opportunities. But I felt the proposal wasn’t financially viable. I informed them that sewing would not help increase women’s income significantly. We needed something unique,” says the 42-year-old.
A few days later, the KVK officials returned with a suggestion of training women to prepare and sell roasted soybean as a healthy snack.
“I was given the task to identify 10 women willing to undergo training for a week in Gurugram. After their selection and training, we needed equipment like a microwave oven and capital to buy raw materials to start the business,” she says.
Pooja managed to get a loan of Rs 10,000 from a private bank to launch their venture — Kshitiz group. Though she overcame one financial hurdle, other socio-cultural challenges awaited her.
Pooja says the women started offering their product, roasted soybean, in exhibitions and local markets. But they realised the need for presenting a wide variety of products.
“With some market research, we learned about other healthy snacks and started preparing laddus, cookies made from wheat, soy sticks and items made from bajra, jowar, among others,” she says, adding that the food was appreciated and the business picked up.
Pooja says that all the raw material for the production is sourced from local farmers. “We prepare all the products from scratch. The wheat and bajra are ground into flour by us, after which the preparations begin. All products are quality checked and that’s the reason for the high demand for our products from the market,” she says.
Pooja says that the nine groups are governed by PV Sahyog Mahila Gram Sanghatan, a democratically elected women’s body where the stakeholders contribute Rs 10 daily. “We have raised a capital of Rs 4.5 lakh and disbursed it to women who were in need of starting their business. This way, the community is never short of funds,” she says.
Besides making the women from her village financially independent, Pooja has reached out to women from Madhya Pradesh and parts of the country to train them in the snack business. “I have trained about 1,000 women so far,” she says.
