TOI: Create markets, grow incomes: June 18, 2011

    What you see here is the most common of all attempts to break the stagnation of rural poverty in India. It works like this: identify a local skill or resource, organize it, orientate it towards modern urban demand and provide the crucial linkage to the market. In other words gate crash the urban market.

    The Kutch enterprise — it can no longer be called an experiment for it has worked for over four decades and touched 22,000 women — was initiated by Chanda Shroff who comes from an industrialist family. She was involved in drought-relief work in 1969 when she the beautiful Kutchi embroidery work attracted her. That sparked the idea of having sarees embroidered by locals to be sold in Mumbai. Later Chanda Shroff founded an NGO called Shrujan. She and her team of women have never looked back.

    Does it really help? The women earn about Rs.15 per hour — not much, but more than the Rs.5 per hour they would otherwise have earned. And, they are assured of the returns because metro markets are hungry for such work.

    Proximity to cash rich markets and a skill that can easily be adapted to modern needs have made Shrujan a success. Similar success has been seen by artisans in Bankura and Bastar. Their terra cotta products — not traditional pots and pans but decoratives and novelties — have even created an export market. But there’s an element of risk here. A strong marketing tie-up propels the lucky into the ethnic market but not all have the skills or the resources or the Chanda Shroffs.

    Take an area like Dewas district in Madhya Pradesh. Again, a backward, drought-prone swathe with the bulk of people dependent on subsistence agriculture. For several decades now, NGO Samaj Pragati Sahyog (SPS), an NGO is active here. They have adopted a multi-pronged approach to tackle poverty, the core issue in rural India.

    They undertook watershed development programmes which now cover a staggering 112,000 acres spread over 57 villages. Over two decades this work has led to the value of agricultural production doubling in the area. Distress migration has been reduced by 80%. They have developed 38 varieties of local seeds of millets, pulses and wheat which grow with low inputs. They have also introduced no pesticide management (NPM) agriculture.

    SPS did not neglect the crucial force that defeats farmers today — the market. And, they found a straightforward solution for it — pooling. Using the organizational backbone of 1400 women’s selfhelp groups, they started pooling together the produce of farmers, transporting it in bulk to big mandis and striking better bargains. The initiative is completely selffinanced by the women’s groups, including bank credit whenever needed.

    One of the most significant features of this strategy is that the positive outcomes are multiple — employment and incomes go up, but out migration is reversed, environmental degradation is checked, women’s empowerment in strengthened and crucially, the belief that things can be changed for the better takes root in demoralized communities.

    Intervention in agriculture does not always have to be on a massive scale like SPS. The Society for Technology and Development (STD) works in Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh. Practically everybody has land. But cultivation was unviable.

    “Two years ago, I would grow wheat and corn only. I always wanted to grow different varieties of vegetables. But our panchayat has no irrigation facilities at all,” explains Gulab Chand, a farmer from Talhar village.

    Everything changed when STD built a rainwater-harvesting tank in his village. Gulab Chand started experimenting with different types of vegetables. “Now I’m selling vegetables for more than a lakh every year,” he said.

    Another farmer Anant Ram is confident that he would earn a minimum of Rs 1 lakh this season while earlier his yearly income was less than Rs 30,000. He has sown tomatoes and he is experimenting with Trichogramma, a friendly insect that eats up pests.

    Village panchayat president of Nagwain, Roshan Lal said that the NGO has changed the fortune of 12 villages of the panchayat. He said, “They have provided irrigation water tanks to the farmers. They have been providing free trainings to enable villagers to earn a good living.”

    Interestingly, STD also runs a very successful fruit processing unit, a leather tanning unit and a pottery unit in the area. Joginder Walia, founder of STD says that the profit from these cottage scale units is shared among the workers. Potters and tanners are two of India’s big artisanal groups that are very deprived.

    Modern techniques combined with innovative organization has gone a long way in creating livelihoods rather than just training people in skills for which there are no takers.

Reports by Tushar Tere, Ahmedabad & Suresh Sharma, Mandi