PIONEER EDGE NEWS SERVICE/Dehradun
The National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) will provide transport vehicles to women’s self-help groups (SHGs) across blocks in the current financial year to facilitate the movement, collection and marketing of their products, assistant project director and NRLM Dehradun district mission manager (NRLM) Sonam Gupta Singhal said.
Speaking to The Pioneer, Singhal said that under the Return In Kind (RIK) project, community-based organisation (CBO) level enterprises are being supported with a proposed vehicle worth around Rs 10 lakh to strengthen their operations. “Under this, 60 per cent or Rs six lakh will be provided as a grant from RIK, while the remaining Rs four lakh will be contributed by the Cluster Level Federation (CLF), the micro-cluster level federation of women,” she said. The vehicle will be used for the collection, packaging, labelling and marketing of products such as spices and pulses produced by the women’s groups.
According to Singhal, women’s collectives had been facing persistent challenges in transporting goods from villages to collection points and markets. “There was always an issue, from where to collect, how to take the goods and how to move them regularly,” she noted, adding that the dedicated vehicle provision under the RIK project is aimed at addressing this gap. She further said that NRLM plans to extend this support more widely in the next financial year so that about one vehicle in each block can be provided for the women’s self-help groups.
At present, about 36,000 women are associated with self-help groups across the rural parts of the district, Singhal informed.
She said that the transport support is expected to help these women scale up their enterprises by ensuring the timely movement of raw and finished products and improving their access to markets.
Officials said that the initiative is part of broader efforts under NRLM to promote rural entrepreneurship and enhance the incomes of women in self-help groups in the district.
