Tackling Rural India’s Unemployment, Farming Problems: NIRDPR Introduces Agri Entrepreneur Program

The National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRDPR) and Syngenta Foundation India (SFI) are focusing on eradicating rural unemployment and improving the situation of farmers in rural India through the Agri Entrepreneurship (AE) model, India Today has reported.

An AE brings together services such as linking credit and market, access to high-quality inputs and crop advisory for a group of farmers. Its active across seven states and has 580 AE’s serving 75,000 farmers as of October 2018.

AE Enterprise platforms plan to optimise all processes, like the selection of an AE for farmer interactions. This leads to faster scaling up, with greater transparency and creation of networks for seamless transfer of information.

WR Reddy, Director General NIRDPR said, “The AEs we are promoting with the support of SFI will be spread across the country in a scalable proposition in the next five years, providing market-ready services to the farmers while being able to generate revenue for themselves."

Even some State Rural Livelihood Missions are showing keen interest to transform Self Help Groups of women as AEs.

Mr Prakash Apte, Chairman Syngenta Foundation India, said that Agri-entrepreneurs model is a decentralised village level delivery model, where farmers can access knowledge, technologies and markets at one place, thus solving Indian farming’s massive problem of delivery and availability at the right time.