National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) :

The Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India has launched National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) by replacing the existing Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY), effective from April 1, 2013. NRLM is the flagship program of Govt. of India for promoting poverty reduction through building strong institutions of the poor, particularly women, and enabling these institutions to access a range of financial services and livelihoods services. A women’s self- help group, coming together on the basis of mutual affinity is the primary building block of the NRLM community institutional design. NRLM focuses on building, nurturing and strengthening the institutions of the poor women, including the SHGs and their Federations at village and higher levels. In addition NRLM will promote livelihoods institutions of rural poor. The mission will provide a continuous hand-holding support to the institutions of poor for a period of 5 – 7 years till they come out of abject poverty

Main features of the scheme:

(a) NRLM is promoting a major shift from purely ‘allocation based’ strategy to a ‘demand driven’ strategy wherein states have the flexibility to develop their own plans for capacity building of women SHGs and Federations, infrastructure and marketing, and policy for financial assistance for the SHGs.

(b) NRLM will identify the target group of poor through a ‘participatory identification of the poor’ process. This will ensure that the voiceless, poorest of poor are not ignored. In fact under NRLM, the first preference is given to the poorest of poor households.

(c) NRLM will promote the formation of women SHGs on the basis of affinity. It is definitely possible that members who come together on the basis of affinity could be having a common activity.

(d) The NRLM has taken a saturation approach and will ensure all the poor in a village are covered and a woman from each poor family is motivated to join the SHG.

(e) All SHGs in a village come together to form a federation at the village level. The village federation is a very important support structure for the members and their SHGs. The cluster federation is the next level of federation. A cluster consists of a group of villages within a block. The exact configuration will vary from State to State, but typically a cluster consists of 25 – 40 villages. The Village federations and the Cluster federations are the two critical support structures for the SHG s and their members in their long journey out of poverty.

(f) NRLM will provide continuous hand-holding support to SHGs, and their federations. Under NRLM this support will be provided to a great extent by capacitating the SHG federations and by building a cadre of community professionals from among the poor women. The federations and the community professionals will be imparted the necessary skills by the mission.

(g) The objective of NRLM is to ensure that SHG s are enabled to access repeat finance from Banks, till they attain sustainable livelihoods and decent living standards. This was missing in SGSY, where the emphasis was on one time support.