I still remember my first ever meeting with 25 young farmers and visit to Borisinh village near Yavatmal in August of last year (2015).  As a Save Indian Farmers (SIF) volunteer, I personally wanted to meet these hard working souls and get a real sense of their daily livelihood and was curious why these young people were about to leave their own village, their own farmland and migrate to other places for ordinary labor work.  My aim was also to understand their current issue of lack of water conservation and see if our organization can assist them to setup a small self-sustainable source of income through an alternative business as proposed by Save Indian Farmers in partnership with Asia Initiatives (AI) – another Nonprofit organization.

Finally, a decision was made and we started to work on this project with a “two phase approach” using AI’s Social Capital Credits model (SoCCs) with our ground partner NGO (Deendayal Trust – FCRA approved) to bring about change in Borisinh village around start of October 2015 almost two months after my visit. The pilot plan includes providing capital to dairy business in first phase and building stone weirs to provide access to water for farming well after monsoon season is over in the second phase of the project.

25 farmer families will need to gain Social Credits (SoCCs) by participating in following activities which in turn will be used to redeem towards getting 25% down payment to buy buffalo (for each family) and later towards Stone Weirs.

Our goal was to keep these 25 families motivated for first few months till they accumulate 15,000 SoCCs credits to actually reach their first goal of buying a buffalo for dairy business. As of first week of January 2016, SIF & Deendayal have already conducted fast track activities like Monthly Meetings, Daily after school program, Cleaning Common Areas (twice a month), Women’s Health Camp, Agricultural Training seminars, Cattle checkup/educational camp, Children’s malnutrition education. To keep kids of these farmers motivated (to attend daily after school program) SIF also donated 2 android tablets with educational apps developed bypratham.org. Thanks to Prajakta Mahajan!