New Delhi: To prepare for the Lok Sabha elections, BJP’s Mahila Morcha has reached out to women across 1 crore self help groups, leaders in the party said. To this end, the women’s wing is holding a rally at Balurghat in West Bengal on March 6, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to attend.
Leaders of the women’s wing said that they were given a target of reaching out to 1 crore SHGs.
“The party is building a focus on SHGs and through the campaign, we reached out to over 10 crore women and engaged in SHGs,” Mahila Morcha president Vanithi Srinivasan said.
The campaign, which was called Nari Shakti, was carried out as part of the party’s Gaon Chalo Abhiyaan, where leaders of the party reached out to people in villages. Under the Gaon Chalo Abhiyan, 12 lakh party workers were divided into teams or “toils” who were deputed to carry out a ‘pravas’ or overnight stay in all villages in their respective regions.
Srinivasan said that Modi’s rally will be telecast by women’s wing members across the party, at mandal-level gatherings.
Pooja Kapil Mishra, general secretary of the women’s wing said that the last woman in a village should have access to these loans.
“Till 2014, there were only 2.35 crore women in SHGs. Today, 11 women are in SHGs, which means 9 crore women have joined in the last 9 years. Contribution of SHGs is as much as 18-20 per cent of GDP, and 90 per cent of SHGs have women,” she said.
She added that the campaign started on January 16, and through it, the women’s wing held state-level workshops with their workers to reach out to the women in SHGs, and eventually held programmes called ‘Sakhi Samman Samaroh’ where these women are felicitated. Mishra said that most of the women that they reached out to were already benefiting from 3-4 of the central schemes.
During his Independence Day speech last year, PM Modi said that the government is creating 2 crore ‘Lakhpati Didis’ in villages, workers of SHGs who earn at least one lakh rupees annually, by making loans available to them. During his speech in the Parliament during the Interim Budget session, Modi said that the government now aims to increase that to 3 crore women. Over 15,000 SHGs, Modi had said in August last year, will be given loan and training for operating and repairing drones.