Jan Udyog

JAN UDYOG = Rural Entrepreneurship

Rural Entrepreneurship Development Program:

Rural Entrepreneurship Development Program (REDP) is an intervention of Janakalyan targeted to educated rural unemployed youths of India. Janakalyan identifies potential entrepreneurs and develops their skills and entrepreneurial qualities to turn them as job-creators and not job-seekers by assisting them their own self-employment ventures. In collaboration with NABARD, Janakalyan has created more than 300 entrepreneurs from rural areas. Sri B. B. Mohanti, CGM, NABARD, has visited some of these entrepreneurs/enterprises and appreciated the efforts of Janakalyan.

Major activities taken up under Jan Udyog:

• Rural Entrepreneurship Development Program
• Market Survey & enterprise selection
• Creating Job-creators and not job-seekers
• Finance / Credit Mobilization towards venture capital
• Technology support
• Troubleshooting to the entrepreneurs
• Expansion or diversification of enterprise
• Market Linkage

Ensuring Participation of Community in National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme:

Raichur is the most backward (last ranked) district in Karnataka as per HDI and thus Government of India considered implementation of MGNREGS in the very first phase among the 200 districts brought under the umbrella of this ambitious scheme in India. Semi-arid conditions of the district combined with poor natural resource management has led to a situation of widespread poverty and chronic food insecurity. This has seriously compromised health of the communities, making women and children highly vulnerable reflected in high Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) and Maternal Mortality Rates (MMR). All these have resulted in low Human Resource Development and poor care of children and women.  Exacerbating the problems are the poor literacy rates that underscores the urgency to undertake steps to enhance the quality of life of the people with emphasis on meeting basic health care needs.

Occupational analysis: Raichur is an agriculture predominant district proved by the government data, which also depicts dependency of people on various occupations.

About 37% (SC & ST) of the total population is considered to be vulnerable and about 73% of the working population is directly dependent on agriculture.

On one hand the dependency on agriculture is very high (73%) while on the other hand the land use intensity is as low as 15%. The major reason, as identified by the communities, is lack of resources for developing their land and creating water-holding structures such as farm-ponds, bunds, trees, etc. Careful observations of the rainfall data for last 10 years depicts that, it rains heavily for few days with intermittent long dry-spells causing drying up of the standing crops. Having water-holding structures such as irrigation tanks / farm-ponds help to store the runoff during the rainy season and use it for life-saving irrigation during dry-spells. The runoff so stored could also help to intensify the land use during khairf thereby increasing the per capita income.

It is in this context, MGNREGS, the national flagship program and an historical project everseen in India as well as in the whole world was introduced in Raichur district in 2006. Since then, it has seen many ups and downs in its execution but not met the expectations of the very target groups for whom it is designed. The design of the project exhibits that it is meant for 2 categories of the people viz.

1)      The Wage Earners (WE Group), who would get 100 days of employment in a financial year and

2)      The Optimum Users of Resources (OUR Group) generated/created while providing employment to the WE groups.

This indicates that MGNREGS is meant for WE & OUR groups meaning WE work for creating productive (agriucltural) assets for OUR own usage. If we carefully observe the 8 priorities of works mentioned in the NREG Act, we find that all 8 priorities are to create productive agriculture assets only and nothing else than that as illustrated in the table below. However, how far these objectives are met is a question to be answered by the public representatives as well as public servants.

It is in this context, Janakalyan has taken up an initiative in May 2011 to strengthen participation of community (WE groups) in its implementation to create productive assets for OUR groups in 57 villages of 8 Gram Panchayats of Sindhanur taluk in Raichur district, with the support of SDTT.

The objectives of our intervention in these villages are ?

1. Ensuring effective Grama Sabha in all Gram Panchayats to make people friendly plans under NREGA to create productive assets for the farmers.
2. Ensuring rightful entitlements to the wage-earners (WE) as per the provisions of NREGA.
3. Advocacy at district and State levels for necessary changes both in the Law and in implementation by developing strong networks of organizations.
4. A strong Labor collective that takes care of rights of the wage-earners in long run.
5. To develop models for creating productive assets to improve agriculture scenario in villages.

Need Additional Information?

The reports brought out on quarterly basis to document the outcomes / reach out of the project can be accessed through the following links-

1) QPR I (Volume I) for the period May-July 2011

2) QPR II (Volume II) for the period Aug-Oct 2011?

3) QPR III (Volume III) for the period Nov-Jan 2012?

4) QPR IV (Volume IV) for the period Feb-Apr 2012

Productive Assets Creation by leveraging NREGA Funds

Raichur is an agriculturally predominant district and almost 73% of the total working population is directly dependent on agriculture as their source of livelihoods. At the same time, the asset-base of the district is very poor, especially the productive assets required to improve the agricultural productivity. The following table gives some basic information about the dependency of the district on agriculture for their livelihoods.

On the one hand, the livelihood analysis of demographic data depicts that about 45% of total population of Raichur is agricultural wage-earners, who needs additional employment (1^st objective of NREGA) while another 28% of the population is cultivators, who needs the durable and productive agricultural assets to secure their livelihoods (2^nd objective of NREGA). 

On the other hand, the NREG Act, 2005 set the dual objectives to address both these issues of providing additional employment as well as creating durable productive assets using the same amount of funds as under-

1. To provide livelihood security to the households in rural areas by providing not less than 100 (one hundred) days of guaranteed wage employment in every financial year to every household, whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled and manual work.
2. Creation of durable assets and strengthening the livelihood resource base of rural poor.

This means, a penny spent shall bring double benefits to the people for whom the scheme is meant for. The wage-earners shall get employment while the farmers shall get the durable productive assets to improve agriculture productivity. However, the tail end farmers have some peculiar problems to optimize their productivity. These problems are of special cadre and thus need special attention to resolve. To state some of these problems are-

1. Inadequate Irrigation water: Hardly 20% of the land is irrigated and 15% land is used intensively (more than one crop per year) which is very bad in the present context (after green revolution).
2. Salinity & alkalinity: About 10-20% of the land in the low-lying areas is saline & alkaline, where nothing can be grown. Choking of drainage line & use of water from the drainage lines (which drains the water from upper reach farms ? leached out water) are the major reasons for salinity & alkalinity.
3. Chemical-heavy farming leading to degraded soil fertility and thus least productivity: Overdoses of chemicals left the residues in the soil degrading the soil fertility over a period of time. Therefore, the productivity has gone down to any extent. Lack of biomass and litters in the farms has also contributed to soil degradation.  
4. Undeveloped land: There is still lot of lands belonging to the bottom strata of the society which have not been developed so far. 
5. Lack of connectivity: Physical connectivity of the land to the residential areas is very poor causing problem for timely transportation of inputs (causing reduction in yield) as well as produces (causing post harvest losses). Further, the farmer cannot even think of going for high-income crops which are perishable in nature.

Now, if we look at the priorities of NREGA as stated below, all these above 5 problems of tail end farmers could easily be addressed by NREGA. The focus of the Scheme shall be on the following works in their order of priority:

1. Water conservation and water harvesting.
2. Drought proofing (including afforestation and tree plantation).
3. Irrigation canals, including micro and minor irrigation works.
4. Provision of irrigation facility to land owned by households belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes or to land of beneficiaries of land reforms or that of the beneficiaries of Indira Awas Yojana of the Government of India program
5. Renovation of traditional water bodies including de-silting of tanks.
6. Land development
7. Flood control and protection works, including drainage in waterlogged areas.
8. Rural connectivity to provide all-weather access.
9. Any other work, which may be notified by the Central Government in consultation with the State Government. In order to ensure that the adequate investments under Employment Guarantee Scheme are channelized for plantation programs, a minimum of 20% of the value of works taken up in a Village shall be on plantation program. Roads can be taken up as last priority not exceeding 10% of the value of all the works.

A comparative statement below shows how the problems of tail end farmers could be addressed by NREGA priorities.

The above table clearly depicts that NREGA could be a boon to the tail end farmers, especially for the farmers of this part of the country, provided the scheme is implemented in its true spirit. What is happening in reality is something different and in this context, Janakalyan initiated this intervention with a hope to sensitize the PRI members, government officers and communities to make its best use.

Additional Details:

To address these issues, Janakalyan has initiated an intervention with the support of Sir Dorabji Tata Trust with the participation of farming communities and wage-earners

Need more information?

Please read the following volumes fo the reports prepared at the end of each quarters-

1. Volume I: Quarterly Progress Report (February-April 2010)

2. Volume II: Quarterly Progress Report (May-July 2010) 

3. Volume III: Quarterly Progress Report (August- October 2010)

4. Volume IV: Quarterly Progress Report (November – January 2011)

5. Volume V: Final Report (February 2010-March 2011)

6. ?Volume VI: Quarterly Progress Report (April-June 2011)?