Viveka Rural Livelihood Centre

The SHG procures raw material, processes, packages & markets Ragi products like Chikki, running the show all by themselves.

Earlier, Pavithra had to travel over a hundred km to work as a daily wager in Coorg, picking coffee & doing odd jobs in coffee estates. She, like every single tribal mother we’ve met, willingly accepted extreme hardship to earn asteady yet unjustifiably small income hoping to educate her children & ensure they don’t go through the same hardships, a motive for community driven development.

The SHG members trained at Prakruthi Food Products (PFP), the very first Ragi Processing Unit set up in Jagankote hadi in 2017. Learning the craft from the experienced tribal women from PFP who took the same road to change their status quo, to become entrepreneurs of change, Pavithra got a hands on that was contextually
relevant & culturally appropriate. Three years ago, at PFP, we met Poornima, who like Pavithra wanted to quit daily wage work, educate her children & build her house. Now
as role models, the women at PFP instil confidence that’s grounded in reality.
In less than a year, the Hunsekuppe unit has produced products worth Rs 1,50,000. The unit can produce market ready products worth Rs 25,000 every month. Adding the
equipment cost, raw material cost & packaging, they are yet to break even.

This is a classic case of building the Human & Social capital of communities resulting in community owned development. A model that is replicable in other rural settings too. Prakruthi Food Products showed extraordinary resilience during the pandemic to prove the model works in scenarios where traditional development models have buckled. At the grassroots, women from nearby taluk witness the transformative power of Prakruthi Food Products when they come for exposure visits, attesting it through a lived experience.
Backstage, the visionaries of development from Hunsekuppe and faraway worlds played the role well. The building now transformed into the Ragi Processing Unit was built by Karnataka State Small Scale Industries Development Corp., as it was left unused, the Gram Panchayat offered the women to set their ragi unit there.

From rupees two, today the contribution from each member has gone up to rupees fifty, little by little, adding up to a total savings of four lakh fifty thousand. Their collective economic capital is only a part of the social capital that they have built by working together with a deep sense of trust & reciprocity, benefiting each other, their families and their village.

The SHG has been giving internal loans to its members as a safety net for COVID-19. Internal loans for starting a new business, admission fee for school, a wedding ceremony etc. are registered in the log maintained by the SVYM representative working with them. Also logged is the amount they collectively offered for building 46 toilets in their community, each toilet costing 15,000 rupees, the amount was later reimbursed by the Gram Panchayath.

The SHG also purchased 32 ‘Gujarat Boilers’, a type of water heater that uses significantly less wood for heating to reduce the time spent for collecting wood from the forest.

The fig tree stands tall as a metaphor of what the tribal women have achieved by coming together & building their social capital. Just like the tree branching out above and below the ground to grow, these women have grown by engaging across social hierarchies.

Self Help Groups are the fundamental unit of socioeconomic empowerment. SVYM works with numerous Self Help Groups made of indigenous tribal women & specially abled individuals towards their socio-economic empowerment.

Going back as far as 30 years, our continuous efforts & involvement in creating social collectives in tribal communities has been a great learning experience. The result of which is our conviction in developing the human and social capital, leading to greater participation of the communities in their development, & resulting in greater equity and economic growth.