"My goats are my assets

A tribe of goats stood stubbornly in the middle of the road leading to the village of Oorudaiyanpatti. I was going to meet Bakkiyalakshmi Sathiskumar, a borrower who was part of a Joint Liability Group (JLG) led by Boopathi Rethinakumar. After some difficult negotiation with the goats, the field officer and I continued our journey and reached the village. Bakkiyalakshmi was waiting for our arrival and welcomed me warmly inside her home, while holding on to her squirming two-year-old son. An M.Com graduate, she used to teach Commerce at a school nearby but quit her job to take care of her children. She hopes to go back to teaching by next year. Bakkiyalakshmi’s husband is a mason and her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter goes to a palvadi (kindergarten school) nearby. To supplement her family’s monthly income, Bakkiyalakshmi decided to buy goats and rear them. It’s been two years since she received the loan of Rs. 15,000. She bought two goats, one which was pregnant, and two goat kids (one of them being a keda - male goat) initially from within her village. After rearing and raising them with good fodder and grazing, she sold three goats to rearers in her village. “Each one fetched me somewhere between Rs. 4000-5000, leading to a profit of around Rs. 2000 for me,” she said. Now, Bakkiyalakshmi owns one goat and one kid from the initial tribe. She takes them out for grazing twice a day to fields nearby and buys them food and fodder. “Goat rearing doesn’t incur much expense,” she explained. “We buy theeni (food) for the goats when needed, as they get most of their daily nourishment by grazing. Now that I have another goat kid, I consider it an asset and hope to make more money in the future.” I requested Bakkiyalakshmi to bring her goats out from the shed for a picture. She looked into the camera proudly as the goat kid drank milk from her mother.