Bengaluru-based RAHI is supporting 800 farmers under these five FPOs to improve yield through agri-tools, equipments and other inputs, it said.
This kind of rural projects will bring resilience in the rural farmers who are now left with no option but to migrate to the cities, it added.
“Hunger and lack of income is the biggest enemy for the rural poor. We are trying to make the vulnerable people in the villages self-sufficient and self-reliant. With adequate income available in villages, the need for migration can be stopped and the cycle of poverty reversed,” RAHI Executive Directr Dola Mohapatra said in a statement.
As part of its COVID-19 response, few projects have been launched. One of the projects, focused on creating end to end value chain for millets, has been initiated in Bargarh, Odisha, the NGO said.
For the past few years, some farmers have shifted from paddy to finger-millet cultivation and it is now receiving wider acceptance in the area, it said.
RAHI said that FPOs have become a common vehicle to share resources and inputs and they also provide an assured market platform in the absence of which an individual farmer would be subject to whims and fancies of private vendors.
Farmers are expecting 80-100 per cent growth in production and 100 per cent increase their income per acre of land. With an assured income, these farmers will have better resilience with less dependence on migrant income, it added.
In the past, RAHI programmes were carried out in Ri-Bhoi district of Meghalaya to create value chains for pineapple and banana farmers.
Currently, RAHI is working in four tribal villages of Bhil tribes in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh to create end-to-end value chain for goat farmers.
While the immediate short-term goal of such rural projects is to support the migrant labourers from the cities and towns to cultivate their lands, the broad objective is to enable farmers generate enough income in villages so that distress migration is minimal, RAHI said. PTI LUX
