Face Palm

MANJUSHA KUMARI, a resident of Gaya district, began working for the Bihar government’s Jeevika mission in 2013. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had introduced the scheme in 2007—with funding from the World Bank and, later, the National Rural Livelihood Mission—to empower rural women by organising them into self-help groups. These SHGs pool together their members’ savings and disburse microfinance loans. They are federated into village- and cluster-level organisations. As of March 2024, there were over a million SHGs, seventy thousand village organisations and almost two thousand cluster-level federations in Bihar. These community organisations collectively have 15 million members, known colloquially as Jeevika Didis. The autonomous Bihar Rural Livelihood Promotion Society oversees the entire architecture, but the actual administration is carried out by around a hundred and fifty thousand Jeevika cadre, like Manjusha, who are hired on a contractual basis. As a community mobiliser charged with facilitating ten to fifteen SHGs, Manjusha was paid a monthly honorarium of Rs 4,000, with the BRLPS only contributing Rs 1,500 and the SHGs meant to cover the rest.

“They pay us part-time salaries but expect us to work fulltime,” Manjusha said at a Mahila Samvad in Patna’s Sadaqat Ashram, where the Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra wanted to hear about the struggles faced by the women of Bihar. The event was held on 26 September 2025, about six weeks before the state went to the polls. Manjusha was one of six speakers, each of whom represented a line of work dominated by women, such as staffing state-run childcare centres or cooking midday meals for schools. They had similar grievances about the meagre salaries they were paid, the terrible conditions under which they worked and the consequences they faced when they protested.

Jeevika cadre had gone on strike in September 2024, after the BRLPS announced that it would gradually stop contributing to their honorariums. This passed on the entire burden to the SHGs, which are not in great financial health. According to data released by the BRLPS, a few months earlier, over eighteen thousand community organisations had been declared non-performing assets, while nearly a hundred and fifty thousand others were set to follow suit. Jeevika Didis—including both cadre and SHG members—were often unable to repay their loans, which came with annual interest rates above twenty percent, as well as additional debts to moneylenders and microfinance firms, who could charge thrice as much interest as the SHGs. Besides a withdrawal of the order, the striking workers had a number of demands, including fulltime salaries, benefits and maternity leave.

A month into the strike, the state government deposited Rs 537 crore in the bank accounts of 15,314 SHGs, the largest component of a Rs 1,650 crore transfer to beneficiaries of various schemes—essentially injecting liquidity into a stressed financial system. Local officials were eventually able to persuade the cadre to return to work, but the government did not meet their demands. The protests continued until December. At the Mahila Samvad, Manjusha said that the cadre had been threatened with dismissal if they did not end their agitation.