Targeted Rural Initiatives for Poverty Termination & Infrastructure (TRIPTI) aims at enhancing the socio-economic status of the poor, especially women and disadvantaged groups, in ten districts of Orissa over a period of five years, beginning 10 February 2009. The project is assisted by the International Development Agency of the World Bank and implemented by Orissa Poverty Reduction Mission, a society under the Panchayati Raj Department of Government of Orissa. TRIPTI project under World Bank Assistance is running in 38 blocks in 10 districts that will be treated as pilot blocks for NRLM.
The SHGs are at the first tier of the community institution structure. One SHG is formed constituting 10-20 women members (in case of disability or dispersed location the group size may be 5 to 20). The second tier of the structure is called Cluster Level Forum (CLF) which is an aggregation of 5 to 15 SHGs at the village/hamlet level. GPLF is the third tier of SHGs which is formed taking representation from all CLFs at the GP level.
I have the privilege of working closely with TRIPTI block level team and SHG Federation at Kharidpipal GP for 21 days in Balasore. Bhograi is one of the blocks in Balasore that falls under the TRIPTI project. It consists of 32 Gram Panchayats out of which I was placed at Kharidpipal. Kharidpipal GP consists of eight villages. The GPLF federation of SHG is constituted of 13 CLF and 152 SHG. The detail of the structure is given in the diagram. That gave me a decent understanding of the SHG model that will be implemented in NRLM scheme with a slight tweak. I will draw the conclusion that the creation of dedicated machinery (staff support) & Universalisation of SHGs has made it more sustainable than SGSY.
Looking on the data of Annual Exp of Average Poor – Rs.40-60K; 35-55% Food; 10-30% Health; 15-20% Education; 10-20% C&E (MGNREGS 2011). Most of the schemes related to the poor fail because the poor spend their money on urgent needs such as health rather than asset building. It is not only economic poverty but lack of financial planning that also plays a crucial aspect. Hence, TRIPTI focuses on the Micro Investment Plan (MIP) which is a household investment plan prepared by individual households and their consolidation at the SHG level.
MIP has socio-economic information will include critical factors such as income, assets and liabilities, needs and problems, number of earners and dependents, single woman, physical/mental disability amongst the members in their family if any, health problems, livelihoods and opportunities, skills, saving capacity, social backwardness, literacy, etc. It will look for the income and expenditure statement of members. The SHG at the outset ranks its members according to their wealth. The Self Help Groups will then be facilitated to prepare a list of all SHG members along with their loan requests indicating both activity/purpose and loan amount. The group would appraise each loan request and determine the loan terms like the amount of loan, installment amount, repayment period, etc. Here, the group would take into consideration the potential for chosen activity in the local area and the competence of the members to carry out the same gainfully.
