EMN
Dimapur, April 17
The North East Rural Livelihood Project is making ‘good progress’ in states such as Tripura, while Nagaland is one of the three northeastern states where the scheme is facing a bout of ‘saturation’ particularly in institution building projects, the Ministry of Development of North East Region has said. The other two states are Mizoram and Sikkim.
The objective of the North East Rural Livelihood Project is to improve rural livelihoods, especially that of women, unemployed youth and the most disadvantaged, in four North Eastern States of Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.
“With minimum coverage of 70% of the households of the project villages, institution building has almost saturated in Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim. Good progress has also been made in two districts of Tripura,” the ministry stated in a handout made available to this desk on Friday. “By end of March 2015, the project has formed 13,685 SHGs, 142 self help groups village federations and 1351 CDGs. Having the solid platforms of development laid down, the project is now focusing more on creating resilient livelihoods for the community people”.
With a view to contributing towards the corpus funds and also to provide livelihood support, the project has so far provided seed capital to 11049 self help groups and livelihood Funds to 5780 selp help groups amounting Rs.22.09 crore and Rs.28.24 crore respectively.
Another Rs.6.52 crore has been released for entry point activities and execution of Community Development Plans. The project has also started 4 model livelihood clusters with approximate investment of up to Rs.100 lakh each on “piggery, goatary”, and dairy.
North East Rural Livelihood Project, a central sector externally aided multi-state project was launched in March 2012. The main thrusts of the project are to build community based organizations such as self help groups, SHG village federations, community development groups, producer-organizations etc. and strengthen the existing ones; to nurture and build capacity of the community-based organization leaders for enabling them to participate in decision making and development process; to provide financial support for promotion of livelihood activities; to facilitate technical support, expert services and knowledge transfer through partnership; to provide vocational trainings and skill trainings for self-business and job placement; to promote a few livelihood clusters; to provide necessary linkages for institutional finance; and to develop value chains on certain potential products.
The desired outcomes of the project include (a) making the SHGs promoted and supported by the project sustainable, (b) increasing the income level of the members of the self help groups (at least 60% of them) and disadvantaged households by 30% in real term and (c) providing jobs or self employment to the unemployed youths through various skill trainings, entrepreneurship development trainings, vocational trainings and management development trainings.
NERLP has also put a target of providing skill trainings to about 20,000 unemployed youths from the project districts. For organizing skill trainings on different trades, the project has entered into MOUs with 16 Voluntary Training Providers who are either government/semi government organizations or NSDC empanelled.
Till date, about 1, 045 youths have been trained out of which around 519 got placement in various parts of the country mainly in retail, hospitality, IT and health care sector. Another 393 candidates are getting placement very soon and 216 youths are undergoing training.
Apart from physical achievement, the financial achievement of the project for 2014-15 has been impressive. As against the budget allocation of Rs.90.00 (RE), the project has made a total expenditure of Rs.72.13 crore. This under-expenditure has been mainly due to delayed releases of the RE budget of Rs.60 crore sometime in the first week of March 2015.
