With the Devi’s blessings

The Jat leader with his trademark grass green turban has been equally successful in pandering to his favourite votebank with kisan credit cards besides lavishing generous grants on panchayats for making dharamshalas, pucca phirnis (the road circling the village) and vridh ashrams.

But it’s the Devi Rakshak scheme, the first of its kind in the country, which has fired the popular imagination. The do-gooder, which came into being in October last year, provides an insurance cover of a lakh to one earning member of every family in the state in case of unnatural death.

Sohan Lal Phulley, senior divisional manager of National Insurance at Karnal, who’s bearing the brunt of this exercise, calls it a brilliant piece of thinking.’’ The government, which has paid us a premium of Rs 4 crore, is reaping much more.’’ Figures corroborate this: in Karnal district alone, the company has shelled out more than Rs 70 lakh in six months. On ground, the money is giving new direction to hapless widows. Today Satbiro, 20, who has a year-old-daughter, is planning to milk this sum by starting a dairy business. Sitting in the tiny shop of her father-in-law Siri Chand, this frail girl who looks barely 16 says she has no intention of returning to her parents. ‘‘My folks are quite hard up… besides this is my family,’’ she says before retreating behind her veil, her frisky baby in her lap. Her poise tells a story of self-confidence, gained perhaps from that cheque. For Nirmala Devi of Jhanjhari village, whose husband Karamveer, a security guard, was knocked down by a car last October, this is a safety net she will use for her three children aged eight to 14. ‘‘It’s a big sum, I’ve never seen more than Rs 1,000 in bank,’’ she says.

You see the steel in her eyes as she relates how she plans to tend the 1.5 acres owned by her husband. A few houses away lives Mehli Devi. The composed middle-aged woman with worry creasing her brows, she tells you how the cheque, which arrived even before the kirya of her husband Babu Ram who died in an accident, helped her deal with the pack of lenders. ‘‘Unfortunately, my husband was deep in debt, the cheque helped me pay it off.’’ Now her two sons, aged 18 and 20, can start on a clean slate. More important, their meagre landholding is safe. Luckily for them, the kisan credit cards introduced last November have made even small landholdings more lucrative by freeing the farmers from the stranglehold of moneylenders. Tara Singh of Jhanjhari, who owns 2 acres, says he’s already borrowed Rs 60,000 for fertiliser at an unheard-of 4 pc interest. Though much more affluent, Randhir Singh of Uchana village, is equally kicked. ‘‘Where else do you get loan at this rate?’’ he asks.

Fleshing out the scheme, BDO, Karnal, M S Tanwar says every card specifies the upper loan limit based on the landholding. The farmer is at liberty to take loan for any purpose, and can return it within three years.

At the bustling Umri village, just a stone’s throw away from the National Highway nar Kurukshetra, it’s the funds the CM has given for dharamshalas that make villagers ecstatic. ‘‘We’ve got one for every caste, be it the Sainis, the Jats, the Kashayaps, the Harijans, … it tots up to seven,’’ says the dumpy Devi Dutt Kaushik, husband of the sarpanch Santosh Kaushik. This is perhaps one of the wealthiest panchayats of Haryana with a bank balance of Rs 1.8 crore. ‘‘We got it from HUDA which purchased our shamlat land,’’ explains Kaushik. But that hasn’t stopped the village from enjoying the CM’s grant of Rs 6 lakh for a vridh ashram—a room with a view on the approach to the village.

Standing in the bustling bazaar of the village with a population of 5,000, Prem Sagar, an advocate and a hard-core Congress voter, admits: ‘‘The CM has done a lot of work.’’

But ask the slowly building crowd whether it will translate into grateful votes, and there is a sudden hush. As a voice from the back puts it: ‘‘Who knows…there is no guarantee.’’