Animesh Ghosh

Placed at:   Purulia, West Bengal

Education: Master’s in Rural Development from IGNOU under BB College Asansol and B. Tech in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering from Techno India Saltlake Kolkata under WBUT sansol and B. Tech

Prior work experience:

• Worked for 2 years and 8 months in PRADAN in Purulia district of West Bengal on poverty alleviation through interventions in livelihood baskets leading to change in Quality of living though other aspects too.
  One key work during fellowship
  Issue:
• Traditional and mono-cropping agricultural practices lead to less productivity and food insufficiency
• Fragmented and discontinuous market for rural artisan groups
• Alarming percentage of child undernourishment
• Availability of fallow land

 

What was done:

• Improvising the traditional agricultural practices for enhancing food sufficiency and reliability on cash crops under Muktidhara
• Forward and backward linkage for providing a sustainable ecommerce platform (egraminhaat.com-digital marketing) for rural artisan groups
• Designing and implementation of a sustainable entrepreneurship model for mitigating the nutrition deficiency and to provide a long term business to the WSHGs through convergence of NRLM ,ICDS ,FCI and Social Welfare under RGSEAG-SABLA program
• Promoting non traditional tea cultivation for livelihood through tourism and other allied activities.

Impact:

• In last two and half years 5000+ families have managed to earn more than Rs3000 per month,
• 382 artisan groups under egraminhaat.com has been able sale products of approx Rs.3.50 lakh (approx) . The website has more than 55,000 hits in a year from 9 different countries till December 2015.
• 3 SHG Clusters have benefited through supplementary food packets initiatives. Other than that 1.22 lakh kids are getting the benefits of food packets.
• 16 families has been engaged for Tea Plantation Project on fallow land with inter cropping for income generation from tourism and agro-horticulture.
• Further, all the four models have been accepted by state government for replication.