Author: Amitabh Srivastava
Publication: India Today
Date: May 11, 2009
URL: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=39626§ionid=24&secid=0&Itemid=1&issueid=104
Introduction: A village girl battles for the
right to an education, overcomes caste barriers and becomes a textbook example
for many through her successful business.
Born in the backwaters of Bihar, and that
too in the lower section of the caste pyramid, it was expected that Anita
Kushwaha would shepherd goats, stay away from school and marry young. Her
father, Janardhan Singh, a poorly-paid employee at a grocery shop, was determined
to make Anita follow what girls had always been doing in Bochaha village of
Bihar's Muzaffarpur district.
But one person did not agree: Anita. She wanted
to break the shackles. Now, at 21 and in the final year of a Bachelor course,
Anita is an established honey-trader with an annual turnover of Rs 2.5 lakh.
Her success story has even inspired a standalone chapter, Anita and the Honeybees,
in an NCERT textbook.
It was hardly easy. Anita won her first battle
when, as a six-year-old, a local teacher and she persuaded her parents to
let her attend school. "It wasn't just our argument; my parents agreed
because education till Class V was free," says Anita. Since they were
incapable of meeting their daughter's schooling expenses, Anita began teaching
children to pay for her education. She also took to running errands for "honeykeepers
from neighbouring villages who would visit our locality thanks to the litchi
trees.
That's how I learned beekeeping," Anita says. Fired by ambition and troubled
by her poverty, she took to beekeeping full time. Using her savings of Rs
5,000 from tuitions and some money from her mother Rekha Devi, she set up
her business in 2002, with two bee-boxes and as many queen bees. In just a
few months, she had made a significant profit.
Anita was stung by bees many times and her
swollen face would be an object of ridicule. But she kept going. "People
would ask me if I get stung. Yes, I'd say. 'Does it hurt?' Yes, I'd say,"
she says. But it does not matter now. Anita's father left his job to join
her business and visits other districts with the bee-boxes so as to collect
honey from different sources.
A pucca house has replaced their modest dwelling
and Anita has gifted a motorcycle to her younger brother. Her improved social
standing is reflected in the fact that her mother is now the village chief
of a political party. Her success has inspired other families to take to beekeeping
and, remarkably, every girl in her village goes to school now.
