I have been associated with project named “Uday Uttrakhand” a livelihood intervention in the hills of Uttaranchal for last six months and have seen many notable changes within a short span of time. As one of the top priority of my organization named Access Development Service (ADS) is to make the market work for poor, and the foremost aim of the project is to increase the livelihood opportunities of the community of our project intervention area by designing the cascade of interventions in a hope that these intervention will increase the level of income generation and community will be largely satisfied with the project end scenario. We work in the area named Kalsi “famous for its Ashokan inscription” small block around 40 km from Dehradun city. The project have seen the two annual crops season and I am sure to say that lot of work have been achieved in the area and overall responses are quite fulfilling. It is also true that there are some gaps within the project which is yet to be bridged and chances are likely that it will difficult to put the cap on it simply because of the nature of gaps rather than putting an honest effort behind it. I meant to say that these gaps are institutional by nature and only institutional arrangements can fill these. The issue of governance with right approach is a critical missing link and continuous effort would only prevail. Before explaining much about the current interventions, I would like to have some understanding of nature of livelihood interventions being practiced in developmental sector.
Livelihood interventions are conscious effort from an outside agency or government institutions, departments to increase the livelihood opportunities of people living in bottom of pyramid of income generation. MNREGA implemented by Govt of India across the country can be termed a largest conscious effort by the Govt agency in recent decade .Number of Indian states like Bihar, MP, Uttaranchal, AP , Gujarat have also launched livelihood intervention prg with help of external agency like World Bank etc named “Ajivika” or related terms.. One of the major impediments in prg implementation come in form of supply of resource, skills, market linkage, credit facility to the community etc “In 1989, Vijay Mahajan and Thomas Dichter proposed an Alternate Livelihood Promotion Strategy through a paper: ‘A Contingency Approach to Enterprise Promotion’. They argued that promoting enterprises was complex and a better approach was to identify the bottleneck and work on that. In many cases, credit could be the only constraint. In such cases, minimalist credit was right and does work well. In other cases, credit is needed but is not the main constraint, what are needed could be skills, inputs or markets. Their argument was, though a large variety of services are required, all of them are not required at the same time and in every case. Thus the offering should be contingent upon what is needed in the situation. They also asserted that only a specialized type of organization could do it. And as it is difficult to build competencies to address all these factors in-house, collaboration becomes necessary”. Further coming to livelihood interventions there are number of approaches adopted by plethora of developmental agencies for their work in Indian context. Some of the approaches can be categories as
Spatial Approach: Promoting livelihoods in a specified geographical area, such as a region, sub-region, command area or a watershed
Segmental Approach: Promoting livelihoods for a vulnerable segment of the population, such as landless households, tribals, women and the disabled.
Sectoral Approach: Promoting livelihoods along a sector of the economy such as agriculture, or a sub-sector such as cotton.
Cluster Approach:-Usually a cluster arises around a particular activity, and eventually a number of related and supporting activities emerge leading to all round livelihood promotion. The activity may be agricultural, product like sugarcane or non farm products like Bikaneri Bhujia. There are several clusters in India, which are known for their products, such as, Shivakashi for matchbox, firecrackers, Ludhiana for woolen garments, Patiala for machine tools, Moradabad for brassware, Ulubedia for badminton shuttle corks, Lonavala for Chiki, groundnut molasses sweetmeat, etc.The twin pronged approach adopted by Access Development Service is mostly based upon cluster approach and SPARC MODEL of intervention. Before dwelling further I would also like to share the brief about the SPARC model of intervention. “SPARC – Small Producers and Artisans Resource Centre (SPARC) is a small team of professionals engaged to provide technical services to the primary producers in the farm and non-farm sectors. SPARC would be instituted by ACCESS, after the initial assessments to intervene in a specific subsector and an identified cluster within that. Located in the cluster the SPARC would initiate the activities to form the producer groups and producer company. In addition to providing technical service by itself, SPARC would leverage technical, financial and other business services from external agencies in the market. In doing so SPARC would make express use of the linkages forged by ACCESS at the national and sub-national levels. SPARC would thus act as a gateway for the primary producers to access resources, finance, input supplies, technology, information, markets and entitlements”[1]. This is meant to say that, to make the project sustainable SPARC model will be set up in each cluster and at end of project life line entire SPARC will be hosted by the project itself. Academically it can be viewed that cluster approach and sparc model will be sustained in coming days. But as far as current scenario are concerns practical testing of model itself has not been done till now. Further there are few examples in the development sector where clusters have been induced by external intervention. Most of the clusters have grown naturally meeting the demand of consumers and gradually expanded in a cluster approach.
In my point of view, the most important task of any livelihood intervention is to rescue the people from the clutches of poverty. It is often claimed that most of the livelihood programme are designed and implemented for the poor and vulnerable but there are very few studies or research are available to validate the objective of project intervention that can be shown to the policy makers, government representatives and other civil society organizations comparing ratio of investment made by organization, and alleviation of poverty from the masses. In our project intervention area we are trying to collect the data on project beneficiaries who actually got the benefits from the projects and how livelihood interventions are changing their status. The evidence based advocacy would be an ideal way to initiate this work. We are sure that in coming days at the fag end of project intervention there will be much to show off at grass root level.
[1] Access livelihood incubation model developed by Access Development Service New Delhi.
Livelihood interventions are conscious effort from an outside agency or government institutions, departments to increase the livelihood opportunities of people living in bottom of pyramid of income generation. MNREGA implemented by Govt of India across the country can be termed a largest conscious effort by the Govt agency in recent decade .Number of Indian states like Bihar, MP, Uttaranchal, AP , Gujarat have also launched livelihood intervention prg with help of external agency like World Bank etc named “Ajivika” or related terms.. One of the major impediments in prg implementation come in form of supply of resource, skills, market linkage, credit facility to the community etc “In 1989, Vijay Mahajan and Thomas Dichter proposed an Alternate Livelihood Promotion Strategy through a paper: ‘A Contingency Approach to Enterprise Promotion’. They argued that promoting enterprises was complex and a better approach was to identify the bottleneck and work on that. In many cases, credit could be the only constraint. In such cases, minimalist credit was right and does work well. In other cases, credit is needed but is not the main constraint, what are needed could be skills, inputs or markets. Their argument was, though a large variety of services are required, all of them are not required at the same time and in every case. Thus the offering should be contingent upon what is needed in the situation. They also asserted that only a specialized type of organization could do it. And as it is difficult to build competencies to address all these factors in-house, collaboration becomes necessary”. Further coming to livelihood interventions there are number of approaches adopted by plethora of developmental agencies for their work in Indian context. Some of the approaches can be categories as
Spatial Approach: Promoting livelihoods in a specified geographical area, such as a region, sub-region, command area or a watershed
Segmental Approach: Promoting livelihoods for a vulnerable segment of the population, such as landless households, tribals, women and the disabled.
Sectoral Approach: Promoting livelihoods along a sector of the economy such as agriculture, or a sub-sector such as cotton.
Cluster Approach:-Usually a cluster arises around a particular activity, and eventually a number of related and supporting activities emerge leading to all round livelihood promotion. The activity may be agricultural, product like sugarcane or non farm products like Bikaneri Bhujia. There are several clusters in India, which are known for their products, such as, Shivakashi for matchbox, firecrackers, Ludhiana for woolen garments, Patiala for machine tools, Moradabad for brassware, Ulubedia for badminton shuttle corks, Lonavala for Chiki, groundnut molasses sweetmeat, etc.The twin pronged approach adopted by Access Development Service is mostly based upon cluster approach and SPARC MODEL of intervention. Before dwelling further I would also like to share the brief about the SPARC model of intervention. “SPARC – Small Producers and Artisans Resource Centre (SPARC) is a small team of professionals engaged to provide technical services to the primary producers in the farm and non-farm sectors. SPARC would be instituted by ACCESS, after the initial assessments to intervene in a specific subsector and an identified cluster within that. Located in the cluster the SPARC would initiate the activities to form the producer groups and producer company. In addition to providing technical service by itself, SPARC would leverage technical, financial and other business services from external agencies in the market. In doing so SPARC would make express use of the linkages forged by ACCESS at the national and sub-national levels. SPARC would thus act as a gateway for the primary producers to access resources, finance, input supplies, technology, information, markets and entitlements”[1]. This is meant to say that, to make the project sustainable SPARC model will be set up in each cluster and at end of project life line entire SPARC will be hosted by the project itself. Academically it can be viewed that cluster approach and sparc model will be sustained in coming days. But as far as current scenario are concerns practical testing of model itself has not been done till now. Further there are few examples in the development sector where clusters have been induced by external intervention. Most of the clusters have grown naturally meeting the demand of consumers and gradually expanded in a cluster approach.
In my point of view, the most important task of any livelihood intervention is to rescue the people from the clutches of poverty. It is often claimed that most of the livelihood programme are designed and implemented for the poor and vulnerable but there are very few studies or research are available to validate the objective of project intervention that can be shown to the policy makers, government representatives and other civil society organizations comparing ratio of investment made by organization, and alleviation of poverty from the masses. In our project intervention area we are trying to collect the data on project beneficiaries who actually got the benefits from the projects and how livelihood interventions are changing their status. The evidence based advocacy would be an ideal way to initiate this work. We are sure that in coming days at the fag end of project intervention there will be much to show off at grass root level.
[1] Access livelihood incubation model developed by Access Development Service New Delhi.
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