National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) is poverty alleviation project by ministry of Rural development Govt of India. The basic idea of this project is to organise the poor of poorest under one umbrella through the formation of Self help group (SHGs) and building the community institution by making them self sustainable. The scheme was launched in 2011 to enhance the livelihood. This programme was designed based on learning earlier programme like integrate Rural Development programme and Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana.
The core belief of National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) is that the poor have innate capabilities and a strong desire to come out of poverty. They are entrepreneurial, an essential coping mechanism to survive under conditions of poverty. The challenge is to unleash their capabilities to generate meaningful livelihoods and enable them to come out of poverty.
According to agricultural census 2011, India had over 138 Million farmer household; out of which 24.8 million farmers are small farmer holding while 92.8 Million are marginalised farmer who is holding less than 1 hectare land. Therefore more 85 percentage farmers are having land less than two hectare. Large number of Indian farmer depends upon monsoon; whatever amount they are investing not sure about the returns.
In order to build, support and sustain livelihood of the poor, NRLM will harness their capability and complement them with capacities (information, knowledge, skill, tools, finance and collectivization), so that the poor can deal with the external world. NRLM works on three pillars – enhancing and expanding existing livelihoods options of the poor; building skills for the job market outside; and nurturing self-employed and entrepreneurs.
In this programme women are getting together and meeting with basic daily need but to enhance the livelihood of poor most of the women are farmer in rural area and still do not have access of the market to sell their product through at some place women are reaching till block market and trying to connect with market but at large still need to address the issue of sustainable livelihood for them. Therefore they are forced to sell the product at minimum price and thus it reduces their margin in profit and this leads to stress among the women farmer.
During the last few year there has been growing interest to promote women centric environment and involvement in every decision making at every step taken. Several initiatives have been taken by govt, govt body like financial institution NABARD, and private donor etc. To enable business for women farmer govt trying hard but still they failed to do so. Therefore need to focus on convergence of different scheme and department to come at one platform implement the programme through community institution (SHGs Federation) and need to look on sustainability of the institution. In every project there is issue of sustainability we need to build the programme keeping in mind people not the department or Project timeline.
In 12th five year plan govt of India promoted and had planned to strengthen the farmer producer organization. Their objective is to achieve the inclusive agriculture growth; so both are working in rural area and for strengthen the livelihood for poor of poorest through agriculture. And for same govt has issued guideline for farmer organization in 2013 for giving equity grant and credit guarantee fund scheme up-to INR 10lakh, so therefore govt need to come together at one platform and work together and for people for same we need to change policy.
There has been many need to engaging different department with poor of the poorest to eradicate the poverty, since they are now organizing and building of habit of saving and investment, so need to connect them with market through institution and we need to make businessmen of these women at larger level and form producer organization as well as support them through different ways. The Self help group increasing in rapid way but to connect to market is one of the challenge in front of them .them specially agriculture product. We need to continues support of them; concept of coordination of different department to create enabling environment for them to be the business; to do so we to make change policy enabling fiancé them by banks.
The Reserve bank of India directed to banks on financing loan to SHGs and their producer organization or farmer producer organization. so there is need to credit awareness at the policy level regarding loan for SHGs as well as for Farmer producer Organization. In this role NABARD and Ministry and Small Farmers Agribusiness Consortium and Nongovernmental organization need to lead from front to sanitize about the to meet the financial demand for the poor of poor. For same we need to work on policy level through and need to strengthen the state level banker committee to block level committee.
Secondly to Meet the NITI ayog plan to double the income we need to have a institution which look after for financing them so that women need to involve in decision making and invest in agriculture process. In Indian we still do not have a specific institution to full fill the finical demand of SHGs and Farmer producer organization (FPOs) but country like china, Philiphion have specific bank on financing to farmer organization. Govt of India needs to take action financing source to the farmer if they really want to double the income for farmer.
Another is we need to build the capacity of these marginal women to meet the skill of the market or need to create a market according to skill these women have. And we really need a shift moving forward then we need to build a capacity where women take leading role in value chain of the farmer product.
As we are moving to free market and opening our self and inviting foreign direct investment (FDI) in every sector we need to build capacity of these women and provide enough resource to compete with market, in case of agriculture we need to build fast warehouse where they can store their product and so such case these SHGs institution or farmer producer organization can play a big role creation job and transforming rural area of India with inclusive and sustainable ways.
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