States / Rajasthan

Background

Rajasthan, formed in the year 1949 is the largest state in the country by area. It has 33 districts, 295 blocks and 44672 revenue villages. The state which is known as the “Land of Maharajas” is also famous for Thar Desert and the Aravalli Range. Rajasthan is rich in minerals and its economy is mostly driven by agriculture, mining and tourism. It has a population of 6.68 crores, out of which 75.13% people live in the rural area and the rest live in urban area. Literacy rate in Rajasthan has seen upward trend and is 66.11 percent as per 2011 population census. Around 13.47% of its population belong to ST and 17.83% belong to SC. It was in the year 1953, the Rajasthan Panchayat Act was established and village panchayats were established across the state. The state rural livelihood mission known as Rajeevika (Rajasthan Grameen Ajeevika Vikas Parishad) was set up on October, 2010 by the state government with a mandate to implement all rural livelihood programs associated with the SHG network in the state.

 Kudumbashree NRO has been working with the state of Rajasthan for implementing all the three domains- PRI-CBO Convergence, MEC Project and SVEP. 

PRI-CBO Convergence 

The MoU between KS NRO and Rajeevika was signed in August 2015. The PRI- CBO Convergence project was implemented in 67 pilot GPs of four blocks of Asind, Kherwara, Rishabhdev and Sangod in Bhilwara, Udaipur and Kota districts respectively. The project aims at strengthening local democracy through convergence of Panchayati Raj Institutions and Community Based Organizations. The activities started on field in the month of September, 2015 with Mentor RP immersion and Block level Orientation workshop as its first activity. One of the major focus of the project during its implementation has been the process based capacity building of various stakeholders involved (PRI members, SHGs and Community cadre). A pool of women interested in volunteering for local development were identified and trained as Local Resource Group (LRGs). They were the foot soldiers working at gram panchayat level to impart awareness on poverty alleviation schemes, entitlements and accessing democratic platforms like Gram Sabha by using various participatory tools (PAE, EAP and GP2RP).
25092 women of 2266 SHGs, 191 VOs and 12 CLFs in 67 Gram Panchayats were mobilized to demand for their rights and be the agents of social change. The project was implemented for two years with the technical support of KS NRO. The convergence project ended in August 2017 with selection of 100 Internal Mentors from the existing pool of LRGs. The SRLM is in talks to scale up the project activities to the remaining panchayats in the existing blocks.

MEC Project 

The MoU between KS-NRO and Rajeevika was signed in August 2015. The project is being implemented in three districts of Bhilwara, Kota and Udaipur. MEC selection has been conducted in two batches comprising 154 MECs. Only SHG women are being selected to become MEC in Rajasthan. We have optimised schedule for MEC training in Rajasthan based on pilot experiences from other partner-States. Between February and August 2016, we have completed capacity building for Batch 1 and June 2017 and Nov 2017 for Batch II.  We encouraged MEC to ‘learn by doing’; we initiated enterprise development activities during the capacity building phase. The enterprise development services extended to SHG entrepreneurs by MEC included business plan preparation, marketing, finance linkages and maintaining books of accounts etc. Since August 2016, ME development activities were initiated, and 4637 MEs have been supported until December 2017 and 31 local weekly/monthly and festival markets were done between November 2016 to December 2017. App Based Performance Tracking System has been rollout in three districts. 14 MEC firms are being handheld by NRO mentors and field coordinators. The MEC Policy has been issued by RGAVP in Sept 2017, which has enabled MEC groups to act as technical resource wings of the CLFs and RGAVP Rajasthan SRLM. By August 2017, the NRO staff will exit from the project, and NRO would have established mechanisms for community institutions driving enterprise development and enterprise accounting and performance tracking system.

Start-up Village Entrepreneurship Programme (SVEP)

SVEP is implemented in five blocks of Rajasthan. For the two Phase-I blocks, namely Begun (Chittorgarh) and Kekri (Ajmer) , MoU was signed in December 2015. The three Phase-II blocks, namely Antah (Baran), Deoli (Tonk) and Taranagar (Churu), were selected for SVEP implementation by RGAVP and the MoU for the same was signed in May 2018. SVEP implementation in Begun and Kekri blocks is expected to be completed by July 2020.

All the five SVEP blocks of Rajasthan have been placed with a dedicated mentor for supporting the programme implementation. Further, two Block Anchor Persons (BAPs), experienced senior mentors of Kudumbashree NRO, have been deployed in the state to ensure attention to specific focus areas under the programme. As of today, there are a total of 86 women CRPs-EP, all selected from SHG network, working across the five blocks and have supported/started a total of 4,440 micro enterprises as on 31st March 2020.