For years the household lived on labour in other people’s fields. What it lacked was not only income.
Deventi’s family worked other people’s land. Money was one constraint. The other was information - which schemes existed, when the village was supposed to meet, who decided what.
She joined an Aajeevika Adhikar Sangathan and went to the monthly meetings and the training. She started a kitchen garden. Vegetables moved closer to the house and some market purchases stopped.
Then the same habit of asking turned outward. Residents said the required Gram Sabha meetings were not happening consistently. Deventi and other members carried that from the village to the block, and from the block to the district. Development work in the village began afterwards.
The collective also took up something residents had lived with for years: a recurring collection of grain by Forest Department personnel. Members raised it through their block-level organisation and went to the Divisional Forest Officer. The practice stopped.
A kitchen garden and a claim against the Forest Department belong to the same story. One made the household’s food less dependent on cash. The other established that people living at the forest edge could question a practice affecting the whole settlement.
One made the household less dependent on cash. The other made the settlement harder to ignore.
Collectives, Then Everything Else
DEHAT convened the collective, ran the learning and made the institutional introductions. Deventi chose the issues and carried them. The forming of the group is the part that needs funding; the rest follows from it.