Enlightening Exposures in Gaya, Bihar

My professional and leisure travels this past year have inadvertently taken me through three of Buddhism’s four most significant sites from Lumbini, Nepal, where Siddhartha Gautama was born and became witness to the three tragedies of mortal life, to Sarnath, where Buddha gave his first sermon after enlightenment. During my trip to Bihar earlier this month, I was taken to Bodh Gaya, where Buddha ostensibly gained enlightenment under the neem tree that continues to draw pilgrims and devotees aspiring for the same. Interestingly, it was the high poverty levels characterizing the areas surrounding these holy sites that ultimately incited my visits, and admittedly, I can’t help wondering what the correlation is between the two, if any.

After spending a night in Patna, Bihar’s capital, we traveled to the district of Gaya to conduct field visits as part of the area identification process for the pilot program discussed in the last entry. We engaged in discussions primarily with the women of some of the poorest villages in Gaya, where mainstream microfinance has very little or no reach. Government schemes targeting these individuals are often politicized and tend to benefit those with links to the local elite, including acquiring Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards which qualify individuals for such assistance. Our meetings were conducted in vacant school houses or under a community tree in the sweltering and harsh +120˚ heat of India in villages deprived of running water, electricity, and basic infrastructure.

Female members of an 'extreme poor' village in Gaya

Children observing the village meeting on poverty

As the women relayed what they considered to be the biggest challenges for generating more reliable incomes, I noticed the young girls just outside the classroom rolling the mounds of scented black clay-like substance into agarbatti or incense sticks. I learned that Bihar is one of India’s largest producers of the product, and middlemen from the supply chain provide rural women enough of the raw materials for roughly 10,000 sticks to be handed over in exchange for only wage labor at the end of each week. They, then, sell the near finished or packaged product at a much higher price than the input cost and reap a handsome profit. Income generation through exactly such means keeps these women and their households in extreme poverty because they don’t benefit from the profits of at least reselling the value-added near finished product back to the middleman or directly in the market. Rather, they are exploited for their labor and paid atrociously low wages. Some women have taken loans to purchase the raw materials themselves and take better control of their income generating potential, but how many women can profitably become agarbatti producers without saturating the market? Our answer is diversifying income streams.

Female SHG members gather in Bela block of Gaya district, Bihar

Children playing among the agarbatti production

SHG members share their challenges with us

After several days of such intense exposures, the visit to Bodh Gaya served as a convenient reprieve. The tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment still stands behind a newly constructed temple to commemorate the auspicious site. Pilgrims and tourists from all over the world, but predominantly from East and South Asia, were numerous. I was reminded that even with a thriving albeit relatively small tourism industry that clearly attracted high revenues in the form of donations, charity, and fees, without a commitment from the state government and private sector, that wealth would never be seen by most Biharis.

Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya

Mini stupas surrounding the temple grounds

At the rear of the temple under the tree where it all happened

Front of the Mahabodhi Temple




Buddhist statues in the naves of the temple

Bihar, surprisingly, has a wealth of historically and religiously significant sites, including Nalanda, the ancient Buddhist center of higher learning from 427 to 1197 CE. Its library was one of the eastern world’s greatest treasures and attracted scholars from China, Greece, and Persia. Ostensibly, the library’s collection was so immense that it burned for three months after it was set on fire at its downfall.

Sariputta Stupa at Nalanda University


Back of the Sariputta Stupa


Another view of the temples srrounding the stupa

As we prepare the launch of our pilot program, I’m gearing up for another set of field visits in this once forlorn part of India. Stay tuned for updates.

From Bottom Billion to Next Billion

Prior to joining GF, while conducting an impact assessment for a savings and credit cooperative in Nepal, I saw how poverty cannot be addressed solely by financial means. Particularly for those living in extreme poverty, the solution cannot be limited to providing access to microfinance’s traditional product: an enterprise loan. During the fifty interviews I conducted for the assessment, nearly all the clients claimed that had they undergone appropriate skills development or received training on value addition for the goods and services they were selling, their microenterprises could have generated the additional income required for them to sustainably progress out of poverty. The Solutions for the Poorest team at GF is joining a small but growing group of microfinance practitioners that recognize this and are looking at how microfinance can incorporate new ways of doing business that better meet the needs of the very poor. One approach we are testing couples livelihoods support with microfinance in a financially sustainable manner, contributing to what has been termed the “double bottom line.”

Solutions for the Poorest has partnered with BASIX/The Livelihood School India, a pioneering livelihood promotion institute, in this pilot project. On April 13-14, 2010, we kicked off the partnership with a Consultative Workshop on Solutions for the Poorest at the Chandra Gupta Institute of Management in Patna, Bihar. We began working together to design an integrated and sustainable methodology to provide financial and non-financial services to the extreme poor that BASIX would not typically serve through its mainstream microfinance activities. Microfinance practitioners and academics such as Bandhan’s CEO, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, and Dr. Manesh Choubey from the Center for Microfinance Research shared key learnings from their own experiences in working with the poorest, resulting in a successful exchange of ideas that will help effectively shape our own program.

To broaden our understanding of existing pro-poor microfinance initiatives, my colleague, Malini, and I also travelled to Calcutta to visit Bandhan’s Targeting the Hard Core Poor (THP) program. THP targets female headed households with no or very erratic income opportunities and provides them with the skills and assets required to jumpstart a microenterprise. This support, supplemented with confidence-building measures, cultivates a seemingly limitless entrepreneurial spirit.

One such inspiring example was Shahida Bibi, who with her seven children and disabled husband, survived on a weekly income of $2 Shahida earned as a housemaid. Without any productive skills and regular income, Shahida was not considered creditworthy by other MFIs. THP provided her with four goats eighteen months ago to help generate a more consistent income stream that has allowed Shahida to provide for her family while also nurturing the habit of savings. Since then, she sold one goat for $43, then diversified her income stream by buying chickens and selling eggs, and later by selling coconuts and vegetables to her neighbors. Shahida is a client many microfinance institutions would have overlooked previously, but has now grown into a real business woman, generating a weekly income of $43, and already planning for additional ventures.

Having the opportunity to practically address the issue of global poverty in a holistic way has made the past month’s immersions in Solutions for the Poorest initiatives an intellectually stimulating and inspiring experience. I look forward to continuing our work to propel the bottom billion into the next billion.

SHG members gather in Maner, Bihar

Bandhan THP client with produce from her own farm

Bengali script on wall advertisement

Children of Bandhan THP clients in West Bengal

SHG members in Maner, Bihar

Edited version published on Grameen Foundation's Creating a World Without Poverty.