A Way Towards Community Ownership

Striving to ensure food sufficiency and improve livelihood opportunities and the overall quality of life of the tribal communities of Chaibasa, PRADAN’s interventions with INRM-based approaches were planned and executed by the villagers themselves

Introduction

T he tribes of Chaibasa district have corpus money of about Rs 9 million in their community account! Yes, Jharkhand Tribal Development Society (JTDS) transferred this money to the 23 different programme execution committees (PECs) in its watershed villages, in participation with PRADAN, which promotes livelihoods. According to a villager of Nilaigot village of Sonua Block, “The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Generation Scheme (MGNREGS) should be implemented in the same manner as the Jharkhand Tribal Development Programme (JTDP).” PRADAN professionals feel inspired when they know that they have worked on something worthwhile for the community. Earlier, this was not so; the people of the area were not aware of the implementation process of land and water activities. This happened after the inception of JTDP. There is significant ownership and accountability by the people of the programme. There are various reasons behind this, which we will explore further.

Jharkhand Tribal Development Programme (JTDP)

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), in collaboration with the Ministry of Rural Development, Government of Jharkhand, formed JTDS. The objective of the programme was to develop and implement a replicable model that ensures household food security and improves livelihood opportunities and the overall quality of life of the communities. For this very purpose, JTDS was constituted and it is responsible for the overall programme. It invited some of its own NGO partners to implement the programme in these areas; PRADAN is one of these NGOs.