Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

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  • Publication
    Transforming Rural Non-Farm Livelihoods: The NRLM Journey
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Gupta, Arshia; Nair, Vinod
    Rural India is primarily an agri-based economy. Over-dependence on agriculture has meant declining percapita rural income which has gradually initiated a shift towards the non-farm sector. This transition from agriculture to non-farm sectors is considered an important source of economic growth. DAY-NRLM, which has been instrumental in reaching out to sixty-eight million rural poor women, witnessed a similar shift towards non-agricultural sources of income. This trend encouraged DAY-NRLM to adopt dedicated entrepreneurship promotion measures. Even though, NRLM is more than a decade old, enterprise development programmes have been initiated only in the last five years. These initiatives are expected to gain pace and momentum through National rural economic transformation project (NRETP), which aims to identify existing enterprises with growth potential and provide dedicated services to help them scale-up.
  • Publication
    Integration of Health and Nutrition into Livelihood Programs under DAY-NRLM
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Chava, Lakshmi Durga; Buggineni, Padma; Rani, P. Usha
    Over the past two decades India has seen significant improvements in household incomes, agricultural productivity and child survival, although malnutrition among children remains high, despite improvements over the last decade. While stunting and underweight prevalence has gone down, trends in corporal wasting show an overall increase in the last decade. The decrease in stunting has been from 48 percent to 38.4 percent, (1 percentage point per year). Similarly, underweight prevalence has reduced by 0.68 percentage points from National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-3 (2005-06) to NFHS-4 (2015-16).
  • Publication
    Social Inclusion: Implementation, Outcomes and Key Learnings
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Singh, Varun; Rani, P. Usha
    The Government of India (GoI) approved the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) in June 2011 to implement a renewed demand-driven strategy of rural poverty alleviation and sustainable livelihoods, based on universal social mobilization, building community -managed institutions of the poor, and universal financial inclusion. The central objective of the NRLM is to ‘establish efficient and effective institutional platforms of the rural poor that enable them to increase household (HH) incomes through livelihood enhancements and improved access to financial and public services.’
  • Publication
    Leveraging Institutional Platforms to Promote Convergence
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Kumar, Shantanu; Pinto, Alreena Renita; Gupta, Arshia
    The launch of NRLM to address rural poverty marks a paradigm shift in poverty alleviation because unlike other programs that preceded it, the NRLM focuses on training and capacity building, and enabling women to prepare and implement their livelihoods plans through own institutions and from banks. The importance of promoting convergence with other rural development programs, as well other ministries, is enshrined in the framework of NRLM.
  • Publication
    SHG-Bank Linkage: A Success Story
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Kumar, Shantanu; Pinto, Alreena Renita; Arora, Amit; Roy, Sourav
    Access to adequate and timely credit at affordable rates is critical for the rural poor to alleviate high cost debt and invest in livelihood opportunities. Despite the government of India’s (GOI’s) best efforts, financial inclusion of the rural poor has been beset with multiple challenges. The SHG-Bank Linkage Programme (SBLP) was initiated as an action research by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in 1989 and was subsequently crystallized into a pilot project in 1992. The pilot project was conceived of as a partnership between SHGs, Banks and NGOs in which the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) allowed banks to lend directly to SHGs and NABARD committed to providing re-finance and promotional support. The SHGs have successfully leveraged about forty one billion US dollars loans from banks since 2013-2014. Advocacy with the RBI, digital financial services (DFS) and Indian Banks Association (IBA) and interventions at the field level have resulted in exemplary growth in the SHG-Bank linkage credit portfolio. The key outcomes are summarized in this report.
  • Publication
    Institution Building and Capacity Building in NRLM
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Mitra, Shouvik; Kande, Narender; Rani, P. Usha
    The main design principle behind self help groups (SHGs) organizations of rural poor women at the village level was to empower women by mobilizing them into small groups, facilitating interactions and financial literacy, and federating them into higher-order organization to unleash the potential of self help. The movement was initiated in the late 1980s by the Mysore resettlement and development agency (MYRADA) in Karnataka and by professional assistance for development action (PRADAN) in Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan. In 2000, the World Bank supported the Andhra Pradesh district poverty initiative project (APDPIP or VELEGU) project, which leveraged their existing work on SHGs, integrated new lessons and scaled-up the SHG program across the state. In order to leverage the World Bank experience of supporting livelihoods projects in states like AP, Bihar, Odisha and Tamil Nadu, the government of India (GoI) approved a World Bank supported National Rural Livelihoods Project (NRLP) to be implemented in thirteen major States in the country and aimed at creating proof. The World Bank designed the NRLP in the year 2011 with a vision to mainstream SHGs as the primary intervention strategy for rural development. The major pillars for SHG functions were defined as institution building, financial inclusion, livelihood strengthening, women’s empowerment, vulnerability reduction with partnerships and convergence as a cross-cutting theme. Experience suggests that triggering of women’s agency at the community level through provision of strategic inputs coupled with a conducive micro-environment not only enhances a woman’s well-being within her household but also has the potential to transform the community at large.
  • Publication
    Building Rural Poultry Supply-Chains To Enhance Incomes through Community-Driven Interventions: Case Study from Jharkhand, India
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Newton-Lewis, Tom; Jha, Avadesh; Singh, Pratyush Ranjan; Nagpal, Phalasha; Bihari, Bipin
    Layer farming is an income-generating livelihood activity wherein egg-laying poultry birds are raised by a household for the purpose of egg production on a commercial scale. The few traditional rural producer households that are engaged in layer farming in Jharkhand are constrained by high input costs (such as pullets, feed, vaccinations), a high disease-based mortality rate, and poor access to credit, making it a less remunerative income source. Cereal-based feed is imported from Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, thereby escalating input costs1. Jharkhand is dependent on egg imports from neighboring states, thus presenting a promising marketing opportunity within the state. However, low and fragmented production, coupled with poor market linkages and inefficiencies make it a challenge for households to realize remunerative prices from their produce. As a part of its diversified and resilient production systems component, the JOHAR project has invested in layer farming under the livestock development sub-component, with the objective of improving rural livelihoods in Jharkhand. This note investigates a layer co-operative's federation, operational and production model as well as financial feasibility. An operational co-operative in Basia block, of Gumla district, was used as a case and analyzed in detail.
  • Publication
    Moving Forward towards Rural Economic Transformation
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Acharya, Gayatri; Pinto, Alreena Renita; Kakkar, Deepti
    Overview of implementation experience and progress: the first phase of the National Rural Livelihoods Project (NRLP), which aimed to reach 4.8 million rural women, was implemented across 13 states, 162 districts and 580 blocks of the country. NRLP was meant to support the launch and expansion of the Government of India’s flagship program for poverty alleviation, the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana National Rural Livelihood Mission (DAY-NRLM) and provide additional pro-poor investments in 13 states with the highest poverty rates which accounted for almost 85 percent of the poor in India. This program marked a strategic shift within the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) from a focus on allocation, disbursement, and monitoring of central government financial resources, to the provision of skilled technical assistance to states under the aegis of the DAY-NRLM.
  • Publication
    Transforming Rural Farm Livelihoods: The NRLM Journey
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Singh, Anjani Kumar; Pinto, Alreena Renita; Singh, Paramveer; De, Alok
    The agriculture sector is the largest employer in India, providing direct employment to more than fifty percent of the nation’s workforce. Small and marginal farmers with landholdings of less than two hectares comprise eighty-six percent of all agricultural labour, reflecting high land fragmentation and low economies of scale. Mainstream extension and agriculture support services are not customized for these farmer segments, limiting their capacity to access improved production inputs and technology. The situation is even more complicated for women farmers who constitute nearly forty-three percent of India’s agricultural labour force. The DAY-NRLM farm livelihoods strategy evolved against this background to leverage the program’s social infrastructure of sixty-eight million households mobilized into exclusively women based self healp groups (SHGs) and higher federations, in order to deliver intensive and targeted capacity building of small farmers and streamline access to credit for farm needs. Key sub-sectors under the DAY-NRLM farm livelihoods portfolio include agriculture, livestock and non-timber Forest Produce (NTFP), supported through a combination of programs including the Mahila kisan sashaktikaran pariyojna (MKSP), National rural livelihoods project (NRLP) and Sustainable livelihoods and adaptation to climate change (SLACC). The farm livelihoods strategy under DAY-NRLM has evolved over the years from its initial focus on enhancing productivity through improved inputs and production methods, to a suite of interventions that address multiple entry points in the agriculture value chain.
  • Publication
    Leveraging Community Institutions to Support Agri-Business and Livelihoods in Jharkhand
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03) Bihari, Bipin; Khanuja, Jasmeet; Kothari, Anand; Newton-Lewis, Tom; Singh, Gurpreet
    The JOHAR project was initiated in 2017 to aid targeted rural producer households to diversify and enhance their household income, and achieve a significant increase in real income until 2023 in selected blocks of rural Jharkhand. The JOHAR project recently completed a baseline for the project evaluation using a randomized controlled trial, supplemented with a non-random control group outside the program area that provides a counterfactual based on an additional quasi-experimental design. The purpose of this note is to present key baseline results and how they validate the project's theory of change. It summarizes the findings from the baseline, presents the status-quo on potential JOHAR beneficiaries, and outlines how the project can achieve its target of enhancing and diversifying the income of rural producer households.