Gatherers to entrepreneur

Van Dhan is a recent intervention in tribal-forest areas of our country. Experts have already begun to acknowledge the potential it carries to transform these areas. Before Van Dhan was born, the major programme India had for rural employment was the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Keeping people gainfully employed within their villages through employment guarantee is both a challenge and a necessity. It is important because it addresses several other critical issues like supporting villagers during the lean months of the year; protecting them from falling into the debt-trap of the moneylender; pre-empting migration of rural folk to urban areas in search of wage jobs; and the consequent problems it generates for both the migrants and the civic administration in urban areas.

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme was nobly conceived to address this issue. After normal hiccups in the early years, the scheme is helping generate thousands of man-days of wage-work in rural areas. In the process, several local infrastructure projects are being undertaken, like, Catch the Water (CtW) project in Madhya Pradesh.

However, wage employment in lean months is like a response to an emergency; it is like providing timely oxygen, let's say. It is very important because it is life-saving! NREGA scheme was meant to be this, and it is.

The more serious challenge, though, goes beyond wage-employment. This relates to providing a stable, respectful and gainful means of livelihood to the rural folk in their villages. This challenge is more severe in tribal areas because of various socio-economic factors. Wage employment during lean months is a different matter, and cannot ever substitute the issue of stable livelihood. Therefore, making the NREGA scheme a round-the-year affair can never be the solution. That would be like keeping a person alive by putting him indefinitely on a life-support system. The right solution, rather, is to find ways to cure him as quickly as possible and to get him going on his feet.

The Van Dhan Vikas Yojana, a scheme of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, was born to address this need for a stable solution to the problem of livelihood in tribal-forest areas. The scheme is executed by TRIFED — an apex body created to provide marketing support to the tribes. Van Dhan not only complements the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme but goes beyond it. It would not be wrong to say that Van Dhan begins where the NREGA stops. Van Dhan lifts NREGA-beneficiaries to the logical next level. A happy point is that Van Dhan and NREGA are not competing in tribal forest areas; they are coordinating and synergising for the short and long-term good of the tribes.

Van Dhan is working to transform wage-earners into micro-entrepreneurs. The age-old mindset of wage labour has demeaned villagers, especially the tribals. Van Dhan is using the term 'tribal start-ups' to drive home the spirit of entrepreneurship. These start-ups relate mostly to micro units that process non-timber forest produces (NTFP). The law has granted ownership rights to the tribes over NTFP, and they have valuable traditional knowledge and skills in this field. It is logical therefore that they should use these resources and skills to transform their traditional work into a new-age industry. TRIFED is facilitating this transformation.

Traditionally, the tribal women gathered NTFP from the forests, and trade operatives bought these from the women. The produce then moved up the supply chain to the mainstream industries in large towns. The effect of this was that once the NTFP season (usually three to four months a year) ended, the villagers became idle and cash-starved, and had to turn to wage-work under the rural employment scheme. The task of processing NTFP would be done in large cities, generating employment there, while the tribes who under the law were owners of NTFP, sat idle.

The NTFP villages, in effect, were reduced to being mere transit-warehouses of raw material for town-based industries. The correction introduced by Van Dhan through emphasising value addition and marketing by tribals themselves is social as much as economic. The women gathering the NTFP are now owners, not wage-earners; and the village is an industrial centre, not just a warehouse.

The structure set up to implement Van Dhan is as follows: Around 20 NTFP gatherers have been formed into a Van Dhan Vikas Kendra. 33,376 Van Dhan Vikas Kendra have been established to date in 26 states. 15 Van Dhan Vikas Kendra are clubbed together into Van Dhan Clusters. 2,224 such clusters have been formed to date. The target is to form 50,000 Van Dhan Vikas Kendra, grouped into 3,000 Van Dhan Clusters.

The roadmap for TRIFED's intervention revolves around the above two 'gaps'. The game-plan is simple and clear: (a) Discourage the sale of produces in raw form by encouraging multi-lateral value addition, and (b) strengthen marketing support in every way.

To begin with, the minimum support price has been declared for 87 forest produces. This has put the intended pressure on the private operatives to pay a fair price and practice fair trade or be elbowed out of business. The Van Dhan scheme is being implemented in states through the State Nodal Agency in a true spirit of federal cooperation. After procurement of the NTFP, the primary processing of the produces is done at the Kendras. The secondary processing is done at the cluster level. For tertiary processing, which requires more capital-intensive facilities, two large food parks are being developed in Jagdalpur (Bastar) in Chhattisgarh and Raigarh District in Maharashtra. Altogether, nearly 55 Lakh tribal women and men are already associated with the MFP and Van Dhan operations through more than 8,000 collection centres set up all over the country. More than 500 products being manufactured by the Van Dhan start-ups include packaged organic honey, jams, agarbattis, packaged spices, hill-grass brooms, confectionery, energy-drinks, packaged herbs, millets, oils, cereals and pulses, etc. These products are sold by them through multiple channels: direct sales, sales through the nationwide network of Tribes India showrooms, e-commerce channels and others. TRIFED is playing multiple roles of facilitator, marketing agent, retailer and, most importantly, regulator and overseer to ensure that the start-ups should not be cheated and killed by anyone.

Van Dhan, in that sense, has triggered a quiet revolution for justice and equity for the tribal folk in trade, industry and commerce. It is facilitating a tectonic shift in tribal-forest districts from wage-employment to stable livelihood; from support during lean months to round-the-year engagement; and from labour to the entrepreneur on the social ladder. Van Dhan start-ups are about enforcing 'Sabka Vikas' to make the five-crore tribal-forest population of India self-reliant, 'Atmanirbhar'.

The writer is the Managing Director of TRIFED, Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India. Views expressed are personal