MP govt opposes Reliance project

BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh government has once again opposed Reliance venture into the retail segment and has termed it as an anti-poor instance.

Speaking at a Department for International Development (DFID) programme for the poor, Gopal Bhargava, minister for rural development and panchayat, said, “If billionaires like Ambani will eat the poor’s share, where will the poor will go?”

He asked the international agency United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to sponsor more programmes like those funded by DFID in Madhya Pradesh.

“They buy commodities like spinach, potato or fruit at dirt cheap rate from the poor farmers, sell it at their Reliance Fresh stores and mint money,” the minister said.

Not naming the company, he said, “Makers of Uncle Chips buy potato from our farmers at dirt cheap rates and sell it at Rs 300 per kg approximately in the market. This is unfair, we need to chalk out a strategy to pose a tough competition to these companies by providing direct market access to the rural poor.”

UNDP runs a programme Public Private Community Participation (PPCP) to work market for the poor.

“The programme was handed over to MP Rural Livelihood project team and ended without results. However, an incense-stick manufacturing programme is successful partially in Shahdol district,” said a government source who is associated with the project.

“The PPCP project is not for the poor but for the community,” said an expert.

Launched in 2007, the DFID-funded Rs 357-crore programme — MP Rural Livelihood project — is aimed at creating livelihood opportunity to rural people in 3,000 villages by 2012.

To bring the market closer to the community, UNDP has sought support of social as well as private organisations so that a new strategy can be chalked out.

As many as 45,000 self-help groups (SHGs) are operational in Madhya Pradesh and a large number of them fall under the Rural Livelihood project.

The state is yet to see encouraging results from the programme.

“The challenge before us is how to make the rural products competitive by adding value to them so that the market can accept them,” the minister said.