The Tata Trusts’ associate organisation, Collectives for Integrated Livelihood Initiatives (CInI), has won the prestigious National Entrepreneurship Award 2018 for nurturing an ecosystem of rural entrepreneurs and micro-enterprises. The award was presented to the Executive Director of CInI, Ganesh Neelam, by Suresh Prabhu, Minister of Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation, Government of India, at a ceremony on the 4th of January.
Set up by the Tata Trusts in 2007, CInI works to enhance the livelihoods and overall quality of life of tribal and marginalized farmers. It’s focused “Mission 2020 – Lakhpati Kisan: Smart Villages” programme was initiated in 2015 and works with 101,000 tribal families across the 4 states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Odisha.
Spread over 11 districts and 17 tribal-dominated blocks, the Lakhpati Kisan programme works with 17 women-led apex institutions to bring their community members sustainably and irreversibly out of poverty. The goal of the initiative is to ensure a three to four fold increase in income of each household to INR 120,000 by the year 2020. To date, the Mission 2020 has successfully empowered over 20,000 tribal farming households to become ‘Lakhpati Kisans’ through a mix of institution building, water resource development, market-linked high value agriculture production along with livestock development and allied-agriculture based livelihoods.
“Our aim has been to promote infusion of technology and innovation-based rural entrepreneurship and micro enterprises as a key step towards achieving sustainability and irreversibility under our Lakhpati Kisan programme. We’re enthused with the recognition of our efforts through this award. We strive to ensure that the demonstrated success of these tribal entrepreneurs and enterprises continues to have a ripple effect to motivate other stakeholders in the sector to achieve the aspirations of rural and tribal communities,” said Ganesh Neelam, Zonal Manager, Tata Trusts and Executive Director, CInI.
Honoring young entrepreneurs and eco-system builders for their outstanding efforts in “Entrepreneurship Development” is an important step to catalyse a cultural shift amongst the youth. To this effect, the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) instituted the National Entrepreneurship Awards (NEA) to recognise and honour outstanding young first generation Entrepreneurs and their Ecosystem Builders.
A total of 43 Awards under NEA 2018 have been carefully considered to enable the participation of young achievers below the age of 40 years and their ecosystem builders across sectors, geographies and socio-economic background through the process of nomination. The end goal of the exercise is to highlight models of excellence for others to emulate and improve upon.
