Sreelatha Menon: Livelihood mantra

Bihar's focus on job creation has taken the shape of a national contest for ideas

Bihar, which contributes the first two letters to the acronym BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh), or sick states, has been trying to improve its development indicators.

Jeevika, launched in 2010, is one such effort. It was aimed at coming up with ideas to generate livelihood and implementing these across the state to help the rural folk dependent on migration. The state's agriculture was, and still is, dependent on the income generated by its migrants.

To make the programme dynamic, the state has been holding various contests on livelihood ideas, under Jeevika's Bihar Innovation Forum. The World Bank, a partner in the project, has provided a loan of $53 million and approved a fresh loan of $100 million.

This year, the state also received Rs 300 crore from the Centre, under the National Rural Livelihood Mission.

The Bihar Innovation Forum invites applications for innovative ideas on generating employment, both from the state and outside. In its second phase, it has already received 1,500 ideas, of which about 100 would be implemented, says Arvind Kumar Chaudhury, chief executive of Jeevika.

While the second phase is in progress, the results of the first phase (in the last three years) would indicate whether the state has actually benefited from the strategy.

Taking a leaf out of the Velugu programme in Andhra Pradesh and the Kudumbashree in Kerala, Jeevika has created a social network of community organisations at the village and district levels. In the first phase of Jeevika, one of the prominent projects these organisations were involved in was systematic rice intensification, aimed at improving yields using the least possible inputs. This was proposed by non-governmental organisation Pradan and included 128 farmers in the first year; now, it covers 100,000 farmers, says Chaudhury.

It was felt the programme could enable farmers to create their own seed and grain banks and provide linkages to husk power, etc. But so far, nothing has happened in this regard.

Solar power company SELCO, is another participant in Jeevika. It had created a network of entrepreneurs who maintained and manufactured necessary tools for power plants in Karnataka. Chaudhury, however, says these are not part of the project in Bihar.

The Bihar Innovation Forum is focusing on the state's agricultural economy and projects primarily revolve around agriculture, animal husbandry and rural energy, to an extent.

A couple of years ago, self-help groups from Andhra Pradesh visited villages in Bihar and provided training under the programme. Chaudhury says today, women from Bihar are in Rajasthan, training self-help groups in that state.

Development activist and economist K S Gopal says all such efforts may record success in parts, but it is limited to that. "Though Andhra Pradesh piloted this programme, I cannot say if there has been an improvement at an aggregate level in that state, not to speak of Bihar," he says.

Gopal, currently in Patna to assist the Jeevika project, says while professionalism is good for a project, too many professionals, against grassroot workers, create hurdles.