Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Antyodaya Yojana

Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Antyodaya Yojana or DAY is a new scheme of the Modi Government to replace the National Rural Livelihood Mission (Ajeevika) and National Urban Livelihood Mission implemented by Ministry of Rural Development and Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation respectively.

National Rural Livelihoods Mission

The UPA government had launched the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) or Aajeevika in 2011 by revamping the earlier Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY). This scheme is currently implemented by the Rural Development Ministry and has been renamed as Deen Dayal Antyodaya Yojana (DAY) after integration of both NULM and NRHM by NDA Government.

Background

Successive governments in India have launched schemes to provide self-employment capability to the poor and marginal people. One such scheme was the Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana launched which aimed to promote formation of Self Help Groups in villages and make them capable of self-employment by providing entrepreneurial capacities. But that scheme did not work well because individual SGSs did not survive in want of credit, skills and lack of forwards and backward linkages. However, in some states where the federations of SHGs were formed, the scheme was quite successful. So, it was learnt that when a group of SHGs is formed, each SHG will work closely with members of other groups in their own village and also with members of other blocks and district. This will be a bigger collective group, organizing all the rural poor in a state under one programme.  This is how SGSY was modified in a mission mode to NRLM programme.

Objectives

The objective of NRLM is to organize the rural poor, particularly women into Self Help Groups (SHGs), and continuously nurture and support them till they attain appreciable increase in incomes over a period of time and improve their quality of life and come out of abject poverty. NRLM seeks to reach out to all rural poor women, estimated at 8.0 to 10.0 crores in a phased manner, over a period of ten years.

Salient Features of DAY-NRLM

• NRLM is partially supported by World Bank.
• SHGs and their federations are provided Revolving Fund and Community Investment Fund, which adds to their corpus funds.
• Members are provided loans for both consumption expenditure and taking up livelihoods activities from this corpus and are charged a small interest on the repayments.
• NRLM supports the financial inclusion of the SHG members from rural poor households through bank linkage and also works with the Banking sector to ensure credit flow to the SHGs.
• SHGs borrow from banks at 7 per cent against the average 10.90 per cent to 13 per cent rates charged by banks. The difference is the interest subvention provided through NRLM. Earlier, in 150 selected districts, an additional interest subvention of 3 per cent was provided to all women SHGs on prompt repayment of loans. Now this has been extended to 100 more districts.(Total 250 districts).
• To continue strengthening of livelihoods, a new livelihoods vertical, Start up Village Entrepreneurship Programme (SVEP) has been launched by my Government. The programme aims at helping the poor to set up enterprises and provided support till the enterprises stabilize. In all these endeavors the role of micro financing in livelihood needs to be given continued attention.

Mahila Kisan Sashkitikaran Pariyojna (MKSP) is one of the components of NRLM. It seeks to strengthen the existing agriculture based livelihoods of the poor and participation of women in agriculture and improve productivity.