Sitaram Rao Livelihoods India Case Study Competition

Overview

After an overwhelming response from across the sector in 2009, ACCESS announces the "Sitaram Rao Livelihoods India Case Study Competition 2010". This case study competition has been designed and initiated by ACCESS Development Services to identify innovative models and practices that have significantly contributed to the livelihoods of the poor in India.

Dedicated to Late Shri Sitaram Rao, mentor and guru of the Indian Microfinance and Livelihoods movement, who passed away in 2009, this competition is unique and attempts to document and disseminate innovative and motivating case studies and thus increase awareness and knowledge among the livelihoods practitioners, research organizations, academicians as well as students around new generation models in livelihoods. The 2010 case study competition is supported by Rabobank Foundation.

This competition is a part of the Livelihoods India Initiative that has been initiated by ACCESS to provide a national sectoral platform to allow a fuller discourse of key challenges faced by the Sector in livelihoods promotion of the poor, influence policy, facilitate evolution and refining of strategies and also generate sectoral consensus on the same.

Sitaram Rao Livelihoods India Case Study Competition 2010 - Shortlisted Abstracts

S.No.	ABSTRACT TITLE	SUBMITTED BY
1	Retailing - A Signpost as a Business Metric for a Cooperative - HOPCOMS	Mr. Debashish, Maitra
2	Fostering Farmers Organisations	Mr. L P Semwal
3	Environment - Ethics - Equilibrium	Mr. Siddarth Tripathy
4	SRIJAN's Soy Samriddhi Initiative: A Multi-Pronged Approach towards leveraging the Power of Farmers' Collectives	Ms. Priyanka Parmar
5	Seed to Market	Ms. Anita Rana
6	Agribusiness Micro franchises of Tribal Women Entrepreneurs: The case of Ujas	Ms. Vanita Viswanath
7	Mushrooming opportunities in Darlaghat	Mr. Vishal Bhardwaj
8	Harvesting technology for farming	Mr. Savitha suresh
9	Aggregation of Traditional Fisher folk in Gujarat Coast	Mr. D.Yeswanth
10	The Role of Agricultural Cooperatives for sustainable Agriculture : A case study of Heigrujam Gram Panchayat Level Multipurpose Cooperative Society Ltd.	Mr. Khundrakpam Bobby Singh
11	Dharamrajupalli Seed Cooperative	Mr. Papori
12	Facilitating Remunerative Market Access to Subsistence Producers: A case study of GRISERV - BAIF	Mr. Bhavani Shankar
13	BAIF : Transforming Dreams into Reality for Rural India	Ms. Raji M Ajwani
14	Endogenous development from indigenous systems: A Case on Krishi Prayoga Pariwara	Mr. Megha Y
15	Improving the livelihoods of 5,000 small salt producers across Gujarat.	Mr. Rajesh Shah
16	Weaving Strength with 'Suta'	Mr. Sushanta Kumar sharma
17	Buds of Hope: Promoting Livelihoods through floriculture in Mizoram	Mr. Barna Baibhabha Panda
18	Centre for Collective Development	Mr. Maitree Mukerji
19	Creating Stakeholders, Not Beneficiaries in business	Mr. Kailash Iyer
20	Broiler Poultry Farming- A Source of Income for Poorest of Poor	Mr. Jitendra Kumar Nayak
21	System of Sugar Intensification	Malay Harsha
22	Wastage to usage towards a New Green Revolution	SATHIABAMA.K
23	Fishing For Innovation: The Women Entrepreneurs of Samudram	Mr. Joseph Satish .V
24	"Vindhya Valley - Bringing Prosperity into the lives of deprived	Mr. Vidhi
25	Farmers Producer Cooperative Society: A suitable institutional arrangement for small scale farmers	Mr. Sandeep Khanwalkar
26	Enabling Institutional Infrastructure for Farmers: Poombuhar Farmers Federation Model	Ms. Kottaisamy.P
27	Use of Aggregation to empower farmers by TATA chemicals ltd.	Mr. Stabak Ghosh & Soumalya paul
28	Pot-in-Pot Aggregation	Mr. Harvinder Sodhi
29	Nature Fresh Milk	Dr. G.S.MADHU
30	Redefining Agri-Marketing - A Rural market linkage program by CHIRAG	Mr.Triveni, Sati

The final cases have to be submitted via email to casecomp@accessdev.org by the 5th of September, 2010.

Applicants

The competition welcomes entries from Indian as well as foreign nationals.
Applicants may be management professionals, practitioners, academicians, researchers or B- school students.
Case entries may have more than one author, but the submission will be considered as one only.
Each applicant(s) may submit one case only.
Employees of ACCESS their relatives are not eligible to participate in this competition.

Theme

The 2010 theme of the competition is "Power of aggregation: Poor in agriculture". Over 75% of India's population lives in rural areas, of which majority depend on agriculture and allied activities for employment, income as well as subsistence. This makes agriculture a critical and focal sector for designing and implementing any development interventions. Of the poor engaged in agriculture in India, almost 80% are small and marginal land holders. By the virtue of being small, they have very limited access to resources (land, water etc.) as well as access to markets and other related services like finance, business development services etc. Also, these small and marginal farmers have very low marketable surpluses to productively engage with the markets. Various models of aggregating these small and marginal producers have been made in the recent times in various institutional forms like Agriculture Cooperatives, Producer Company or even Federations. Promoters of these models include NGOs, the Government and the private sector, among others. These initiatives have provided great learning for the entire sector on designing of such aggregation models for the small holders which has facilitated more effective access to inputs finance and markets. While many of these initiatives have been more localized and at limited scale, there are some excellent experiences of scaled up and sustainable models. It is essential that these learning be disseminated across the sector and thus be replicated and scaled-up to have an impact on the small holders at a significant scale.

The theme for this year's Sitaram Rao Case Study Competition is: Power of Aggregation: Poor in Agriculture and intends to bring together learning from various experiences and innovations across the sector on:

Sustainable institutional models for aggregating small holders' produce.
Processes and innovations to create these models.
Mechanisms on Private Public Partnerships in such aggregation models.
People's participation and empowerment.
Private sector initiatives.

Case Protocol

Participants who will be submitting Case Studies need to keep the following points in mind. However, these are just broad guidelines and need to be adapted to the Case Study according to the participant.

INTRODUCTION

The introduction should include a paragraph highlighting the present scenario of the subject of the Case Study Project (Organization/person). The context of the project should also be specified and since when has it been in existence

THE RELEVANCE OF THE CASE TO THE THEME

How can it be explicitly stated that the study espouses the theme "Power of aggregation: Poor in agriculture"

THE UNIQUE FEATURES OF THE CASE

Under this, the following themes can be looked into:

1) People

Why did people aggregate, what were the reasons which prompted this? What is the advantage from aggregation that the group didn't avail of earlier?

2) Organization/ Intervening Agency

How did the Organisation decide this as best course of action, what was the catalyst idea and who was the catalyst? Did it fit with their mission? Approach?
What is the form of the organization? Its governance structure?
Is there any element of PP partnership involved?

3) Human Resources

What was the investment on HR involved in this process? Did the community participate as beneficiaries or stakeholders in the process? Did the aggregation happen on the impetus of the community or the organization?
Community studied-did they have access to land and forests? Education levels? Health conditions? Gender practices? Presence or absence of entrepreneurial spirit? Openness to outsiders and new ideas? What was the level of economic activity within the locale and its interface with the market? Incidence of petty business? Incidence of small enterprises? Sale of farm produce to dealers in high volumes? Services for agricultural sector such as input dealers and market agents?
How did these socio-economic, cultural and economic characteristics of the people and the locale influence the interventions choice? Why?
Does the intervention plan given attention to bringing changes in these characteristics?

4) Social Resources

How did the social relations and institutions influence the livelihood opportunities of the communities?
Does the impact of the intervention include changes in this sphere of social relations either directly or in an indirect fashion?

5) Physical Resources

How is the availability or lack of infrastructure providing opportunities/imposing barriers for promoting livelihoods? Irrigation infrastructure? Road and Rail connectivity? Telecommunication and Transportation facilities? Power supplies? Social infrastructure such as educational institutes and hospitals? Market infrastructure such as warehouses, cold storage facilities for perishable goods? Or any other?
How does the intervention plan to negotiate/has overcome these bottlenecks in achieving its objectives?

6) Financial Resources

What are the institutions (formal and/or informal) of credit available in the locale and for the target community in particular? Banks? MFIs? Moneylenders? Social networks? Government subsidies?
Did the intervention work to alleviate the bottlenecks in the credit market in order to achieve its objectives? How? Subsidized credit from grants? Establish MFI? Promote SHGs? Demand Disbursement to Poor by nationalised banks and/or other public commercial lending institutions? Linkage with Govt. subsidized program etc?

THE IMPACT AND OUTREACH

What is the envisioned impact of the intervention? Will it affect a miniscule or a large section of the population of the area?

THE SUSTAINABILITY ASPECT

What are the threats to the sustainability?
How is the target intervention building on these/using these to promote opportunities for the target community?
Is the intervention sustainable from a business point of view?

THE REPLICABILITY

To what extent is this intervention replicable in other contexts/ geography/ target population in India? Will it help organizations/communities in improving their own models / of interventions?

THE INNOVATIVENESS

To what extent is the intervention innovative in the Indian context? What is the unique feature/aspect of the project/initiative? What is the value added idea - Does it bring to practice and discourse totally new inputs or is it a modification of previous successful ideas?

KEY INSIGHTS

Any additional insight that the participant can share to bring a managerial perspective to this Case Study, such as

Problems faced during the intervention and the action taken to solve these problems and any suggestions for individuals who want to replicate this livelihood initiative.
Scale aspects
Cost efficiency
Time period taken to come up with the model and innovation

Process

All participants are requested to send an abstract of maximum 400 words of their case studies. The abstract should provide overview of the aggregation model and its challenges and learning
Abstracts will be reviewed and a shortlist will be made.
The shortlisted candidates will be requested to send the full case study, not exceeding 5000 words.
Once the final cases come in, they will be reviewed and a final shortlist of about 25 cases will be passed on to the Jury comprising of eminent sector experts.
The Jury will adjudge the best 10 cases using the assessment criteria.
Interested participants must fill in their registration forms along with abstracts and submit the same, maximum by 6 pm on July 25, 2010.
The shortlisted abstracts will be announced on August 5, 2010.
The final case studies must be submitted maximum by 6pm on September 5, 2010 to casecomp@accessdev.org

Jury

The Jury for the 2010 Sitaram Rao Livelihoods India Case Study Competition comprises of esteemed sector experts with valuable experience and knowledge.

Sanjeev Asthana, Founder and Director, I-Farm Venture Advisors
Biswa Bandhu Mohanty, Ex CGM, NABARD
Dr. Sankar Datta, Dean, The Livelihood School
Rajiv Mehrishi, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture
Nisha Agrawal, CEO, Oxfam India

Awards

First Prize: Rs. 1,00,000
Second Prize: Rs. 75,000
Third Prize: Rs. 50,000
Best 10 entries (including the top 3) will be given citations.
The best 10 will be invited to the Livelihoods India Conference to be held on November 17 & 18, 2010 at the InterContinental Eros Hotel, New Delhi.
A compendium of the 10 best cases will be released at the Summit.

Rules

All entries should be submitted in English.
The case study must not exceed 5000 words (excluding tables).
All entries should be submitted in a word document, with font times new roman (12), line spacing (1.5) and margins (1" on all sides).
All submitted cases must be accompanied by a scanned or hard copy of the declaration form, with the signature of the authors. The declaration form has to be ONLY filled in by those whose abstracts are shortlisted and who will send in the final case studies.
The cases should pertain to experiences which are at least 3 years old.
The cases documented must relate to an Indian experience.
All cases must be based on real life situations.
Applicants should avoid cases already written about extensively.
In the event that the case being documented is based on a practice of any institution/ organization, the applicant must take written permission from the concerned institution/ organization and provide a copy of the same.
The case must be unpublished at the day of submission and should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere, even in a slightly modified form.
All cases submitted will be the copyright of ACCESS Development Services and may be published as a compendium/ book with due acknowledgement to the author(s).
All entries will be screened for plagiarism.
The veracity of the cases may be checked.
The decision of the Jury will be final and binding.

Important Dates

July 25, 2010 - Submission of registration form with abstracts
August 5, 2010 - Announcement of shortlisted abstracts
September 5, 2010 - Submission of final case studies
October 4, 2010 - Announcement of the top 10 cases
November 18, 2010 - Awards Distribution on day 2 of the Livelihoods India Conference

Forms

Please download the declaration form here:

Declaration Form

Further Information

For additional information please contact
casecomp@accessdev.org

or

Aarti Dayal
Project Coordinator, Livelihoods
aarti@accessdev.org

Sitaram Rao Livelihoods India Case Study Competition 2010