Have you heard of Srabani Bera? I will not be surprised if your response were, “Srabani who!” So let’s hear Srabani’s story first. Like many other families like hers, Srabani’s husband had to migrate to distant Bengaluru to earn a living.

Such migration always tends to be fraught with pain, pain of separation from immediate family. More often than not, the families suffer more due to the absence of an able male support. Kids miss their fathers, wives their husbands.

Why did Srabani’s husband migrate? This is a non-starter as we all know what does poverty and lack of opportunities to escape the vicious grip of penury do.

Srabani was artistically inclined and she wanted her husband back home but she didn’t know how. Could she have done something with her natural inclination and monetise it?

The help came in the form of microloans. Srabani has set up her own artefacts making unit. She is expecting to scale it up big enough to support the entire family so that her husband will not need to work away from home.

Srabani is an example of what grit and right kind of help may achieve for the person concerned. Everybody has some skill. How one puts that to use differentiates that person from the rest. Srabani by turning her artistic inclination into an earning source for the family is showing others how to ride over the economic bumps.

Srabanis of this world are the actual influencers in the nation’s quest for rural uplift. This is a dynamics that needs reiteration. Why do the poor remain poor? That’s the question that keeps dodging us and has been dodging us ever since we won our freedom.

Subsidy, in the initial days of struggle with development, was thought of as a way of helping the poor out of their predicament. But for decades, the subsidy route failed to yield sustainable gains. The key word in development is sustainable. But the subsidy route proved to be non-sustainable. The idea of empowerment by providing micro capital through the microfinance route started catching up from the seventies.

The foundation of the idea lay in accepting the natural entrepreneurial spirit that is inhered in the poor. Life for them means innovating to survive on a daily basis. What if this spirit was harnessed as the springboard for putting the poor on prosperity cycle? By turning into micro entrepreneurs, Srabanis of this world not only defines a route for self-transformation, they also act as the model for others to follow. They are the real heroes of new India by paving a sustainable development path.