States / Gujarat

Background

Gujarat, located in the western part of India is popularly known as jewel of west. It has an area of 1,96,204 sq km with the population of 60,383,628 according to 2011 census data, out of which 34.67 million population of the state reside in rural areas and 25.71 million people in urban areas. The state shares border with Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra from land side north-eastern and eastern part of India, while it has a coastline of 1,600 km with Arabian sea. The literacy rate of the state is 79.31%. The Gujarat Panchayati Raj Act came into force in the year 1993 following the 73rd amendment of the constitution of India. There are 33 district panchayat, 247 block panchayat and 14,017 gram panchayats in the state. The Gujarat Livelihood Promotion Company (GLPC) which is registered under the Companies Act, 1956 is the executive arm of Mission Mangalam the implementation agency of National Rural Livelihoods Mission.

Kudumbashree worked in Gujarat for implementing the MEC project. 

MEC Project

The MoU for Micro Enterprise Consultant Project was signed between Gujarat Livelihood Promotion Company Ltd. and Kudumbashree – National Resource Organization on 11 January 2015. The project activities were initiated in May 2015 with a State level Stakeholder workshop at Gujarat and exploratory visit by KS-NRO to the pilot districts. Post the exploratory visit, a set of MEC Mentors from Kerala were sent to Gujarat for a field immersion in the pilot locations to understand the state specific context and field requirements. The micro Enterprise consultant project was initiated in three districts in Gujarat namely, Tapi and Narmada districts in South Gujarat, and Patan district in North Gujarat.

Capacity Building of MECs

The first round of MEC selection was conducted in July 2015 and the second round in December 2015. A total of 126 MECs were slected and trained, out of which 30 received CREAM training condcted by TREE Society at Gandhinagar, Gujarat. The Capacity building trainings spanned from July 2015 – May 2016.

Benchmarking
Benchmarking of enterprises in each of the pilot districts was also carried out as part of the CREAM training assignments. This exercise was conducted to create a database of various categories of enterprises with respective average income and expenditure figures specific to pilot locations.

Exposure Visit:

In March 2016, MECs from Gujarat arrived at Kerala for an exposure visit. They visited different scalable business models and were familiarized with various entrepreneurial activities undertaken by community under Kudumbashree and the work done by Micro Enterprise Consultants in Kerala.

MEC Group formation and zoning:

MECs in each district were grouped to work in a zone of 2-4 blocks each in order to support enterprise promotion activities. The idea was to create a working area for the MEC group with a balance between the market opportunity, SRLM presence and each members’ proximity to native block. A total of 105 MECs were placed in 9 Zones across 3 districts.

Beacon Pilot initiation

In May 2016, activities to establish one beacon pilot enterprise were initiated in the three districts. Mobilization workshops were conducted for the same.

Project termination

In August 2016, the MEC project in Gujarat was terminated owing to non-payment of subsistence allowance to MECs by GLPC ltd.