LIVELIHOOD PROMOTION OF TRIBAL WOMEN COLLECTIVES THROUGH APPLICATION OF S&T IN PRODUCTION OF NATURAL VINEGAR USING LOCAL NATURAL RESOURCES
Ghughari village comes under the Maikal Hills region which is a tribal dominated hilly and forest area and scattered habitation. The tribes have a definite way of life style and social-cultural and religious characteristics. A large majority of tribal are associated with agricultural activities but their agricultural fields are undulating and smallholdings and are subjected to severe soil erosion. Due to their marginal and uneconomical holdings, earnings from these pursuits do not give them reasonable level of living. The district is deficient in secondary sector therefore the tribal are totally dependent on dilapidated status of agriculture or on wage earnings from plethora of government schemes being implemented in the district. The tribal here has traditional knowledge of medicinal and other plants, and collect the available NTFPs which are sold to local traders. These tribal are untrained gatherers and have no knowledge of value addition and hence they do not get fair price of the NTFP. In lieu to this, CARD started the initiative of processing/ value-addition of local NTFP’s, Honey, Jamun and Mahua into vinegar through the Department of Science & Technology (DST) sponsored project in 2018. Through our intervention the available raw materials will be used to make natural vinegars and enhance the income of the tribal women through assured marketing tie-ups. The 2 years project aims to:
- Organize Scheduled Tribe women/ Women SHGs into common interest groups
- Facilitate formation of Farmer Interest Groups and bring in the habit of group sharing.
- Organize collective and scientific harvesting of Jamun and other NTFPs
- Generate sustained employment to these groups through appropriate technology application for scientific processing/ semi processing of Jamun and other NTFP.
- Form Farmer Producer Organizations (FPO) of these women collectives and later register as Producer Company.
- Create a reliable supply chain for assured marketing