Closely vetted, these social media groups are all about empowerment

On the Duronto Express from Pune to Kota in Rajasthan sometime in 2016, a young mother’s heart sank on discovering that the milk she had bottled for her 10-month-old child had curdled. It was 8.30pm, the train’s pantry was shut and no passenger had spare milk to offer. The anguished mom keyed in a plaintive post for help on an exclusive women-only Facebook group of which she was a member.
The words “bacha”, “maa” and “doodh” in the post tugged at the heartstrings of many in the group.Suggestions flowed in thick and fast, but reaching out to someone on a running train seemed a despairing prospect. One woman tagged the railways, niggling doubts about the government agency’s responsiveness notwithstanding. Another woman called her brother frantically in Surat, where the train was to halt in another hour. Imagine the mother’s surprise and joy when at Surat, both the railway staff and the member’s brother turned up with boiled milk for the child.
It’s such support and sisterhood which the group — named PULA (Pune Ladies) — engenders that overrides all other considerations, including business, says Sonia Agarwal Konjeti. The 36-year-old, who founded the group in 2015, claims a whopping membership of 1.95 lakh women, 1.5 lakh of who are active participants. But she says she would rather the group be known for the quality of work done than a membership volume which is easy to ramp up if needed.
Konjeti tells of the detailed post of a cancer-stricken member, who explained her journey through chemotherapy and her suffering both on the health and family front. The woman was inundated with not just motivational replies but even some from other cancer-afflicted women who said the post gave them renewed determination to battle the disease.
Then there was a member who was thrashed so badly by her husband at Satara that she left home in the dead of night. While hiding in a nearby farm, she posted about her plight from her cellphone. A well-connected member on the group happened to see her post almost immediately and got in touch with the Satara police, who traced the woman to the farm and put her on a bus to Pune where her parents live.
“Sofa broken? PULA will help you get a carpenter. Dog unwell? Vets on the group are at hand. A woman posts about laboured breathing and 10 other women on the group rush to her house to help her,” says Konjeti, thrilled at having made Pune smaller for her members. Beyond that, she says the group helps women earn through online selling even while sitting at home during their career or pregnancy breaks. The average daily posts on the page are around 1,000 and the age profile of the members ranges from 18 to 75, though most are in the 30-40 bracket.
Quite like an Adam’s rib role reversal, the success of PULA sowed the seeds for a male-exclusive group, ‘Men’trepreneur Pune, on Facebook in 2016. Dentist Azeem Khoja (35), the administrator, says he created the group with his own friends’ circle of around 900 in a bid to empower men economically, socially, culturally and professionally. Today, he claims to have a membership of around 3,500. Awed by Khoja’s success, his friend, who was running a similar group, merged his 735 members with ‘Men’trepreneur!
The bonding which began with business soon grew to encompass biking passions, trekking expeditions, fitness tips and the like. But a glimpse of what the group was capable of came early on, when one of the initial few who had joined up was cheated of Rs 60,000 in a cyber fraud case. The aggrieved member mentioned his loss on the group, wondering if his money could be recovered.
In the volley of replies that ensued, group members provided him with an algorithm of how to go about tapping the authorities. Some suggested that he post the crime on the bank’s page, lawyers gave inputs on the legalities involved and others introduced him to their police contacts. In one night, he had 56 replies to his post and a proper roadmap to follow.
While the case still awaits resolution, it prompted Khoja to make the group more structured by creating subdivisions, each with an advisory board, for IT professionals, lawyers, pharmacists and others. The members on these boards have experience in their respective fields ranging from five years to 20 years.
While Khoja battles it alone as an administrator, Konjeti has appointed 19 members on her group to vet applications and track posts. Women have managed to retrieve their credit and debit cards and shopping bags after posting on PULA, she says. “They have stopped going to police stations,” she chuckles. “But seriously, there are a lot of constructive things that social media can do other than the showiness it is perceived to be prone to.”