Family pressure forced Bhavna to quit school in Class IX and marry at an early age. Ambitious by nature, she overcame these odds to work for the welfare of women from her community.
Four years into her marriage she joined a Self-Help Group (SHG), but after one year, the SHG got dissolved. This did not stop her, and she motivated 12 like-minded women to form another SHG in her village. She was trained on book keeping and accounting skills by us Banking on Change (BOC) project team, that helped the group to manage their finances better, build their corpus and develop leadership qualities.
Bhavna is today an elected treasurer of Jai Hind Federation, which is a group of 200 SHGs from Kattumannarkoil block, Tamil Nadu, and is the mother of four children, the eldest of whom is a B Tech student in Information Technology. She is also the first person to raise her voice against injustice towards any women from her neighbourhood.
“I cannot bear injustice towards women. My aim is to help every woman I can” – Bhavna Shah