Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society, an independent society under department of Finance, Govt. of Bihar has been constituted under the Society Registration Act – 21, 1860.

Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society has initiated JEEViKA – Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project with the support of World Bank.

JEEViKA - Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project (BRLP) has been designed to address rural poverty in Bihar though the collaboration of the poor, Government of Bihar and the World Bank. The project will aim to enhance social and economic empowerment of the rural poor by creating self managed community institutions of participating households and enhancing income through sustainable livelihoods.

Project Objective

The project objective is to enhance social and economic empowerment of the rural poor in Bihar through:

Building self managed community institutions of the rural poor

Enhancing income of the poor through sustainable livelihoods

Increasing access to social protection including food security thorough a greater voice

Project Strategy and Design

The core strategy of the programme is to build vibrant and bankable women’s’ based community institutions in the form of SHGs, who through member savings, internal loaning and regular repayment become self sustaining organizations. The groups formed would be based on self savings and revolving fund and not on a single dose of CIF funds for association given as a subsidy. The primary level SHGs would next be federated at the village, by forming VOs, then at a cluster level, to become membership based, social service providers, business entities and valued clients of the formal banking system. Such community organizations would also partner a variety of organizations for provided back end services for different market institutions such as correspondents for banks and insurance companies, procurement franchises for private sector corporations and delivery mechanisms for a variety of government programmes. This is shown in figure given below:

The project design is based on the above strategy of building a multi-tiered, self sustaining, model of community based institutions who self manage their own development processes. The project strategy is therefore phased in a manner of first horizontally building up a very large number of primary level women based SHG groups with the rural poor, through a saturation policy in the six chosen districts. Because of the extreme poverty levels in Bihar, the project will first capitalize these SHGs, through investing part of the Community Investment Fund, to supplement the self savings of these groups. The groups will also be linked to the commercial banks for low cost loans.

In the next phase, these primary level SHGs will be federated at the village level to form the second tier of the community organization called the Village Organization (VOs). The VOs will receive investments from the project, for further on lending to the SHGs and members, through a second dose of the community investment fund to be used for assetisation, food security purchases, and retiring of high cost debts. A large part of this capital inflow is likely to be for meeting immediate consumption needs, particularly health and food purchase, given the extreme level of poverty in rural Bihar. This will ensure that assetisation and future cash inflows are not wasted on just repaying high cost debts to money lenders in the future.

In the third phase, the VOs will be federated to form higher level community organizations at the cluster and block levels. These apex community level federations will be responsible for enhancing livelihood activities in a comprehensive manner acting as microfinance institutions for lower level VOs, and economic institutions that take up specific income generating activates based on the assets created at the family level, such as animal husbandry, micro- agriculture etc. For the sustainability of lower level institutions as both sustainable economic and social entities such aggregation is essential.

To ensure that assetisation of the poor is put to productive use and does not just lead to them procuring an asset or cash that is captured by the elite thereby not leading to income streams increasing, a set of service providers will be positioned in the project, through partnerships, who provide forward linkages to markets for products and services on which the poor have a very high outflow today. The above sequential and interlinked project design, phased over the project period, will create a social and economic ecosystem controlled by the poor and leading to their own sustainable development.

Project Component

Preliminary project description: The proposed operation would finance a 5 years project. The project’s main components are:

Institutions Building: This component will build the institutional capacity of (i) the poor-mobilizing the poor into SHGs and federations and improving their quality and credit worthiness, transparent and profitable organizations, and developing commodity-based producer organizations, (ii) the support organizations – strengthen existing institutions like Women’s Development Corporation and COMFED (Bihar State Cooperative Milk Producer’s Federation Limited), and establish pro-poor support organization, and Micro-Finance and Enterprise Training Institute. This would enable a wider and better choice of service providers for the poor and lay the foundation for development of good quality micro finance providers in Bihar, and (iii) capacity building of all stakeholders including Panchayats for effective and inclusive service provision and community infrastructure

Investment Fund: The component will have two windows: (i) Social Fund: This will enable poor to access critical social services including health, insurance, support to social action interventions like advisory and legal services, help lines, etc; and (ii)Livelihoods Fund: This will finance livelihood needs and address and facilitate market driven skill building technical assistance, savings promotion and credit access (micro-finance), sectoral investment in various commodity and value chains, livelihood enhancement infrastructure for value addition linkages with agriculture research and extension agencies, private sector partnership and market access. Efforts will be made to leverage resources from financial institutions.

Technical Assistance: The objective is to establish and operate special Technical Assistance and Development Services to assist, support and strengthen Micro-Finance Investment and technical assistance facility (MITA), Livelihoods Business Development facility,and Bihar Innovations Fund.

Project Management: This component will finance the incremental operating costs of the project coordinating them within the implementing agency, monitoring and evaluation systems, studies and other technical services.

Project Scope	Project Cost
The project in its first phase of five years envisages covering :	Project Duration – 5 Years
0.5 Million Poor Families	Total Estimated Project Cost US$– 70 Million
4,000 Villages	Total World Bank Financing – US$ - 63 million
42 Blocks	Govt of Bihar’s Contribution US$ - 07 million
Districts viz. Nalanda, Gaya, Khagaria, Muzaffarpur, Madhubani & Purnia.	Community Contribution US$ - 03 million

Project Cost and Financing

The project size Rs. 328.50 crore ($ 73 millions) and will be implemented over a period
of 5 years.

The break-up of the total outlay of the project is as follows: