As part of
our training programme, we, SLI, periodically visited districts to study the
impact of our programme and also understand the training requirement of the
community from the particular district. On 4th Oct’17, a three
member team comprise of Mr. Lakshminarayanan, Liaison
Officer, SLI, Mr. Raja Ganesh, Programme Coordinator and Mr. Ramkumar,
Logistics Support from SLI visited Coimbatore district and meet the district
officials, cluster facilitators and community members. Further the team visited
some of the community initiated Common Livelihood Group activities to identify
the areas of training needs.
Coimbatore
is one of the major industrialized districts of Tamilnadu and much closer to
Kerala state. It is a hub for major textile and garment industries. Most of the
population mainly depends on these factories for their livelihood. Agriculture
is equally important since the climatic condition of this region is so feasible
for crops and animal husbandry. Coconuts, Paddy, Cholam, Pulses are major
agriculture products of this region. Minimum wage of the labour here range
between Rs. 200 to Rs. 400 per day.
The team interacted with Assistant Project Officers and
Cluster Facilitators of the district TNSRLM and assesses the impact of our
programme at district level. For the past two years more than 30
participants
attended various training at SLI and some of them initiated their enterprises
activities based on the skills they acquired from the training. Cluster
Facilitators informed that 2 of them started Herbal Beauty care units at their
villages and 1 of the participants – Ms. Annapoorna –SS kulam- is doing Masala
ball preparation for her personal needs and also provide it to neighborhoods.
Community Facilitators and members requested to organize training at their
Block or Panchayat level since Auroville is located far away from Coimbatore,
most of the women group members find difficult to travel and stay out of home
two to three days. It was suggested that to do some advanced session at Block
level based on the requirement after completing basic / introduction session at
SLI, Auroville.
The training requirement of the community are Vermi Compost,
Mushroom production, Country Chicken, Millet based food processing, Herbal
products. Marketing of their product is one of the major challenges of the community;
hence their main request is to train them on Branding and Marketing related
support. Asst Project Officers of the
district suggested provide training on Dairy Products, Millet processing, Herbal food production and
Marketing & Packaging.
The team visited Thamaraikulam and Aanamalai villages to
meet Coir production CLG and Petal leaf growing CLG members respectively. The
team interacted with the group members to understand the livelihood
opportunities of their products and its main challenges to address in their
future course of training.
As a whole, this visit gave wonderful experience to the team
to understand the ground realities of rural livelihood sector and also helped
to identify new avenues of training to promote more income generation
activities to the communities in livelihood front.
written by Mr. Raja Ganesh
