Mother was his inspiration to help exploited people

In a few weeks from now, 65-year-old Kulandei Francis from an obscure Tamil Nadu village would be in Manila to receive the ‘Ramon Magsaysay Award-2012’, considered “Asia’s Highest Honour and the Region’s Equivalent of a Nobel Prize”, and he will be also honouring his mother.

Emerging an exemplar of  “Inspiring leadership” in binding broken communities and empowering rural women in particular in the remote villages of Krishnagiri district, Francis would have been lost to the world of “New Heroes of Asia” if he had just remained a theologian-cum-teacher on which he had first set sights.

“The motivation to do something more substantial for society to reduce human misery came from seeing my mother suffering a lot when I was growing up and she inspires me to this day,” an elated Francis, after receiving a communication from the Ramon
Magsaysay Award Foundation for being chosen for this esteemed Award, told Deccan Herald over the phone from Krishnagiri.

Born in 1947 to Kulandei and Mathalai in a remote village Karipatti that was part of the undivided Salem district, Francis grew up in a family that barely eked out a living from a small piece of land.

“In my early life, I saw a lot of suffering, particularly my mother having to borrow from moneylenders and the agony she underwent in repaying,” recalled Francis in a quivering voice. It was a vicious cycle of having to borrow and repay at unreasonably high interest, only to get into debt again. “I wanted to do something to break this, for the cause of freeing people from this vicious cycle of debt and poverty,” he said, taking a deep breath.   
Francis was deeply touched when his parents sold the “only piece of land to
educate me”. And that was how he went to Annamalai University and passed his
B Com. After that in 1969-70, he joined the Fathers of the Holy Cross, a religious organisation in Bangalore, wanting to be formally trained as a priest.

And soon with the Bangladesh crisis reaching a flash-point, he was sent for
humanitarian relief work in a refugees camp in West Bengal, recalled Francis. Later, he joined a theological seminary in Pune for a three-year course. As fate would have it, part of the course-work took him on a field study to Anjetti forest area near Dharmapuri, where “you had to daily walk some 20 km”.

Sesurajapuram is an interior forest village, Francis remembers with a lot of empathy and enthusiasm. “I saw poverty in the raw there when we had to work with people displaced by the Mettur dam. I stayed there for months, did health camps for them and organised night schools. It was then that I decided not to become a priest, but do more solid work for the people,” he mused.

In a moment of self-reformist zeal, Francis then left the congregation and went to Tiruchirappalli where he gained some experience in development work. “In 1979, I registered my social development project as Integrated Village
Development Project (IVDP) in Krishnagiri, now a new district headquarters.

Returning to forest habitations nearby that had stirred his conscience not long back, Francis found the basic obstacle to stabilising agriculture was no structures to store rain water. A watershed approach dawned and “we tried and raised funds for building check dams in those villages like Naatraampalli,” said Francis. To imp­rove literacy, he also ran night schools for shepherd boys.

“We then started male youth groups for micro-credit management, but for several years nobody repaid the money and that first experiment was a failure,” admits Francis. Nonetheless, undeterred, IVDP began organising local women into
self-help groups (SHG) from 1989. That dramatically changed the whole picture.
“We started with 10 or 12 women SHGs  in villages like Naatraampalli and Sesurjapauram with 20 members in each group. They began with a lowly monthly savings of just 50 paise per group member; the results after some time were just fantastic, ushering in a new phenomenon,” Francis, animatedly. went over.

Gradually, similar SHGs’ sprouted in other nearby villages and taluks.
Now there are about 8,400 women SHGs catalysed by Francis’ s NGO in that belt, with a total membership of 1.53 lakh women, who in turn cater to a population of ten lakh.

Cumulatively rolling over a credit-sum of Rs 2,500 crore through various income generating activities, the SHG members’ total savings i of Rs 240 crore, says Francis.

They have disbursed a dividend of Rs 130 crores so far, which now also entitles them to bank loans.

On their own footing, the SHGs now take care of even widows, ensure all children go to a school and get educated up to college level. Child marriages as a consequence have “come down” in those villages, while 50 per cent of the group members have individual toilets. Promoting use of sanitary napkins among rural girls and safe drinking water are among the other activities. “So, you see, we are adopting a holistic approach,” Francis stressed.

In fact, the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation on its website announcing the Award said, Kulandei Francis “is being recognised for his visionary zeal, his profound faith in community energies and his sustained programmes in pursuing the holistic economic empowerment of thousands of women and their families in rural India.” In all this, “the Bible has also been a constant inspiration,” he added.