Surinder Sud: Understanding the assets of 'have-nots'

FARM VIEW

Can rural poverty be tackled merely by deploying technology without incurring too much cash cost? Yes, is the answer.

And the way of doing so has been shown by the Chennai-based M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) with its innovative "bio-village movement", which targets development effort for the human resources rather than material ones.

The genesis of the bio-village concept can be traced to the realisation that the poor are poor because they have no assets "" no land, no livestock, no house and, often, no education.

The only productive assets they have are time and labour, which are normally either undervalued or ignored. The gainful utilisation of these two assets can actually generate employment and income.

As such, the bio-village model of rural and agricultural development seeks to enhance the economic value of individual's time and labour. For that, it helps people to undertake eco-farming, substituting chemical and capital inputs with knowledge and biological inputs.

In the process, it creates more avenues of employment based on opportunities for remunerative marketing. Together, these ensure integrated development of on-farm and non-farm employment in villages.

The bio-village movement began in 1992 in three villages of Pondicherry. Today, it has spread to many other villages. Its success has attracted international attention.

In fact, UNESCO has come forward to facilitate its replication elsewhere in India and abroad. The Asian Development Bank and the International Fund of Agricultural Development, besides various other foreign agencies, are also supporting it.

The Pondicherry administration proposes to cover all the 270 villages of this territory under the programme by August 15, 2007.

The details of how the programme works have been provided by the noted agriculture expert and MSSRF founder M S Swaminathan in a paper (working paper No 20) brought out jointly by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (headquarters at the University of Manchester) and the Delhi-based Indian Institute of Public Administration.

The work plan is indeed simple. Fresh livelihood opportunities are conceived taking into account the capabilities of each family. Landless labour families are, therefore, helped to take up activities like household mushroom cultivation, ornamental fish rearing in common ponds, coir-rope making, rearing of small animals and so on.

Holders of small pieces of land are prompted to take to hybrid seed production, floriculture, dairy, poultry farming and other high-value enterprises. Women are assisted in taking up aquaculture in community ponds in groups.

Of course, micro-credit support is organised through formation of self-help groups wherever required.

According to Swaminathan, the key inputs in this movement are education and training, social mobilisation and producer-oriented marketing. People are allowed to learn through practical work experience and not classroom lectures.

This is because learning-by-doing does not require any formal literacy. Once a person acquires adequate skills, he is encouraged to guide and train others or even become a regular trainer as a member of the bio-village corps of rural professionals.

Thus, most of the 100-odd people who have become regular members of the bio-village corps are either semi-literate or illiterate.

The self-help groups formed in these villages operate community banking systems to provide credit to their members on terms decided by the group members themselves.

As such, the system has low costs but high loan recovery.

The underlying objectives of this movement include bridging the technology and digital divide and using this for narrowing down the economic divide, as also ensuring all-round human development.

For this, computer-aided and Internet-connected rural knowledge centres are set up to provide the information support needed by the rural families in fields like health, education, entitlements, eco-technologies and marketing.

These centres are owned and operated by the local village communities. Trained women convert general information into location-specific information useful for the local community.

Significantly, these knowledge centres are also used to disseminate information on the population supporting capacity of the village eco-system and the need for curbing population explosion.

They also spread information on culturally and socially compatible methods of family planning.

Thus, the bio-village concept provides a road map not only for eradicating poverty and bridging the rich-poor divide but also for ushering in the ever-green revolution (another term coined by Swaminathan to refer to a sustainable green revolution encompassing all fields of rural activities and not crop farming alone).

What is needed, therefore, is to move it out of the boundaries of Pondicherry and replicate it in other states. Though UNESCO proposes to do so under its Asian Ecotechnology Network, that may not be sufficient for a country of India's size and needs.

Local non-governmental organisations will have to come forward to take up this job.