Baluben Makwana - India's 10 Ordinary People with Extraordinary Tales

Baluben Makwana
Baluben Makwana worked a lifetime on other people’s fields but now she is a farmer with her own farm. In 1990s, Navsarjan Trust identified 100 acres of government land near the Vautha village in Ahmedabad being cultivated illegally by the upper class villagers. The land lease was cleared by the trust for the landless dalits. The trust in 2009 helped Baluben to set up a micro-credit group of 51 women and procured the required permissions to start farming on the land. She said, “We earned more than Rs 5 lakh last year and reinvested the money in the fields,” as reported by TNN. Now she is the head of a group of dalit women farmers, called Jai Bhim Mahila Kheti Mandali.