India wins Bangladesh First Test. Ashwin is the man of the match. 103 in the first innings, 6 wickets in the second. After 92 years, India could have more wins than losses for the first time. It is 179-178.
India won Double Gold in the Chess Olympiad at Budapest. In both men’s and women’s competitions.
Sri Lanka elects its new President. Marxist Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Ranil Wickremesinghe, despite his miracle job of getting Sri Lanka back on rails, could come distant third in the elections.
It appears, I have spent three pushkars to find the core strands of purpose for lifework in LPRD-PVM portfolio. 7L -Livelihoods, Collectives, Enterprises, Self-help, N-way. Leadership, management, learning, mentoring support. Systems, strategy, and scaling. Practitioner-academic. Architecturing for NextGen. Volunteering, paying forward, forums, platforms, and emerging technologies. Reaching Akshara – the Livelihoods People; SERP – Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty of combined AP, by 1999, is like finding the agenda of a lifetime. SH remained a key strand of purpose since then.
Beginning with women. Tribal, rural, and urban. Marginalized groups and communities. Groups, Federations, Confederations and upwards. Elders, disabled, and third gender. Neighbourhood groups, producer, commodity, and service groups. Panchasutra, saptasutra, dasasutra, and sodasasutra. Savings, Credit, Insurance, remittance, equity, and pension – microfinance. Bank linkages, interest subvention, and zero interest credit. Using the amount for productive purposes, assets. Community investment funds. Accessing rights and entitlements. LEAPs, Value-chains. Enterprises, individual-collective. Rural marts. Bulk dairies. Collective farming, animal husbandry. Food-nutrition-health. Kitchen gardens. Managing Anganwadis, running PDS, and providing mid-day meals in schools. Positioning volunteers in schools, taking charge of school management. Freeing unfree child labour. Scholarships, tuition centres, and libraries. Taking of public works, construction, roads, sanitation, watersheds, tanks et al. Non-pesticide management, community-managed sustainable agriculture, natural farming. Legal support. Family counselling. Building capacity, skills, and tools. Engendering, gender sensitization. MGNREGS. Layers of activities on self-help – 27, on the last count. Reducing poverty, caring for the needy and visioning prosperity. The trick in the virality of SH is the triad in sync. Ever improving People’s institutions, internal animators, and external facilitators together. Identity to capacity to freedom.
Self-help movement emanated from various sources, in various ways. Civil Society, RBI, NABARD. IRDP, DWCRA-DWCUA, and SGSY. IFAD Projects, SAPAP, DPIPs, SERP, Kudumbashree, Puduvazhvu, SRD-WB, Jeevika, OLM et al. Culminated in NRLM, NULM. Many of the state initiatives transformed into SRLMs. Now, 100 Million rural women, 40 Million urban women, and 10 Million elders, disabled et al are in the self-help movement. Apart from MGNREGS, Governments invest not less than Rs.50,000 Crore a year in them in various ways including interest subvention and SH focused interventions. Banks are providing up to Rs.200,000 loan per member. SH dictates the coming and going of Governments. SH leaders are also getting into local governments, and higher political positions.
Can we continue to facilitate their agency? Can we reach unreached? Can we support in prosperity?
Yes, we can. If we coexist, flow with the caring self-help communities. In N? sanyogayoga for 7L.
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