Christmas at SLI

On Wednesday, 20th of December, the SLI team celebrated its first Christmas party. The story begins with an intern who asked innocently whether he could set up a Christmas tree at the office and became the organisor of an impromptu Christmas celebration. A few days and some shopping tours later a little artificial tree was decorated with tons of ornaments and lights and set up in a Christmas like surrounding. In the afternoon of the same day the whole team came together to cook dinner for the celebration that was to take place that night. A tasty mixture of dishes from different cultural backgrounds was created in a deliciously smelling chaos. But there is no party at SLI without a decent cultural programme: Dance and music in different states of training were performed in a cheerful manner. After cutting cake and sharing dinner and laughter the story ends with a last “Merry Christmas”.

Tirumadi

SHGs has thus far been just a theoretical aspect in our curriculum. A comprehension of how they actually work and the issues faced by them were just academic manuscripts! Being students from Xavier School of Management (formerly known as XIMB), Bhubaneswar, we yearn to perceive the practical Rural Development and the opportunity just knocked itself with the ladies from a village Peria Kanur, Tiruppur.

After joining SLI, Auroville as a part of our Learning experience, we were exposed to a plethora of colours: colours laid by the people of Tamil Nadu, with enthusiasm bubbling and the endless interest to learn and develop not just for themselves but the society in which they live in. During the first few days of our expose, we came across a SHG of 17 women, from Peria Kanur facilitated by Ms. Arockia, a force of empowerment all by herself. They were about to rebuild the brand of their own product, a herbal Thuvaiyal, which they were forced to shut down due to labour issues.

So, timing was perfect: our interests intrigued and they also wanted to have a different perspective of the issues. Not a responsibility, but a herculean task to uphold the confidence in them, their products and its fruition.

Supported by Mr. Michael, Project Director, DRDA, their products were put on sale in the 45-day Government Exhibition of Tiruppur as a market test, being held at Chikkanna Government Arts College. The stall, in which the products were sold, came under the category of Mahalir Thittam (Ladies’ Self Help Group Exhibition and Sales). Keeping the total cost in mind, each bottle was priced for Rs. 70. The product name was unanimously decided to be ‘Tirumadi’ (‘Tiru’ for Tiruppur and ‘madi’ meaning purity). Though the sales have skyrocketed, with the first batch of 40 bottles being sold in the first 3 days itself, keeping it up will be very challenging.

This trial run will be monitored for future expansion by making more products, like herb infused Idli Podi. Gradually, they plan to enter retail shops of the Tiruppur District and also launch their product in Amazon Saheli, an online store which will feature unique products produced locally by Indian women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs under the program will be able to enjoy a slew of benefits such as subsidized referral fees, free imaging, and cataloguing during launch, account management and post-launch support and enhanced discoverability and differentiation of products through specialized storefronts.

Over time SLI has stupendously supported many dreams, given a lot of people the skill not just to work but the motivation to boost their morale to keep them dreaming about their future. They have broken all stereotypes and replaced the notion of earning money to earning sustainable money! They have instilled the society with hope: overcoming all social barriers, the women have high hopes. And we justified the famous quote from Desmond Tutu, “HOPE is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness”.

Dravid

Sarthak Das

Xavier School of Rural Management (XIMB-XUB)

Bhubaneswar

People. Food. Music.: Rural Women Empowerment

Two years ago, Krishna McKenzie published this song which was part of an initiative by Solitude farm, SLI and Emergence to bring permaculture to rural villages of Tamil Nadu. The song and video were sponsored by SLI and recorded during one of our programmes.

Rural Development Secretary of Tamilnadu visits Auroville, 7th November 2017

Mr. Hansraj Varma, I.A.S., Addnl. Chief Secretary and Secretary, RD&PA, Government of Tamilnadu visited Auroville on 7th November 2017. The Chief Secretary was accompanied by the District Collector of Villupuram meet Mr. Mohan Verghese Chunkath, Secretary, Auroville and SLI Executives and Director. He also visited Aurvoille Earth Institute, Sunlit and Naturllement.

Follow up Visit Coimbatore

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 4^th 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 

Read September Report on our blog!

SLI creates a report about its work once a month. It includes various details about all the programmes that happened in a month as well as some feedback and pictures. The monthly reports starting with September 2017 will be posted on the page "Monthly Reports". Please enjoy these further information on our work.

Newsletter September 2017

Video: Former Interns talk about their time at SLI

Varshini and Harish spent 40 days as interns at the Sustainable Livelihood Institute as a part of their studies at Tata Institute. In this time they learnt a lot about farming as strategy for disaster management. At SLI they enjoyed the freedom of choosing their field of work and created for example their own gardening patch.