Villagers who are part of the E-FILM project. Telegraph picture

Jorhat, April 8: A socio-economic project, Eco-Friendly Integrated Livelihood Mission (E-FILM), prepared by Ashoka Fellow Pranjal Baruah to empower people at the grassroots in four states of the Northeast, is among the four or five such projects from the country to be selected for scaling up at the Globaliser meet at Bangalore from May 2 to 4.

The Ashoka Globaliser on Rural Innovation and Farming is a programme supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help select Ashoka Fellows to move beyond local impacts and make the systems work at the regional or global level.

Since its inception, 85 Ashoka Fellows from more than 35 countries have participated in the Globaliser process, along with hundreds of senior business leaders, management consultants and others.

The project prepared by Baruah and his team has also been selected for entry into USA’s Rockefeller Foundation Innovation, the list of finalists of which will be announced on June 18, and also to compete for the Japanese award for the Most Innovative Development Project. This is a competitive grant programme administered by the Global Development Network and supported by the ministry of finance, government of Japan, and carries a grant amount of US $45,000.

Baruah said his team had prepared a model for the village-level similar to the working of an organised corporate enterprise.

“Initially, we began work in all these states to form mushroom clusters in rural areas. There we saw that just developing a few villages as mushroom clusters was not practicable as the villagers were engaged in 10 or more livelihood practices like piggery, poultry, farming, tea and the like. If only one of these were taken up like tea or mushroom there would be imbalance and the growth could not be sustained over a period,” Baruah said.

Explaining how it worked, Baruh said it was seen that if a group of 10 villagers were to procure mushroom spawn and other livestock feed and fertilisers, then each had to undertake a high cost as individuals or small groups.

“If we transported all the necessary items together then costs could be brought down. Likewise, a supply chain would have to be established so that middlemen could be done away with and the produce reach the towns and cities where the demand is generated. A cluster monitoring mechanism would be put into place with educated professionals and stakeholders like the farmers themselves instead of power groups like panchayat leaders or administrative officials,” he said.

“It would be a business like any other profit-making enterprise where an overall socio-economic uplift of the poorest of poor could take place,” he said.

In 243 villages, agri hubs have been set up with government funds where all the activities of the village could take place centrally.

Baruah said the local Globaliser team had visited them then and there were a few brainstorming sessions in which the system was scaled up.

At the village level, training on how to mange micro-enterprises would be given, unemployed youths will prepare and submit plans on how the village can be best developed taking everyone into consideration and out of all the plans we receive, the best will be selected for implementation and the over-lapping and differences ironed out so that the plan can be implemented in the cluster, zonal and regional levels and also make science and technology available to the farmers.