Even as the debate rages over mandatory CSR, with the Companies Bill 2011 currently in Parliament, FE travels to Tamil Nadu to uncover a story of socio-economic change through corporate-led social entrepreneurship that is touching the lives of over a lakh people in 145 villages

Flanked by the picturesque foothills of the Western Ghats, about 40 km to the north of Kanyakumari, villages in the Nanguneri taluk of Tirunelveli district are going through a phase of transformation. Families have regular incomes, local moneylenders are a thing of the past, bank loans are a reality and stability and security are fast becoming salient characteristics of economic and social life.

The catalyst for this transformation is intervention by the Srinivasan Services Trust (SST), the social arm of Sundaram Clayton Limited and TVS Motor Company, which has ?adopted? the taluk and is partnering with the state government for development activities. The Thirukkurungudi centre of the Trust, which has been managing activities in this area for the past decade, works in 145 villages, impacting the lives of about 1.25 lakh people. Villages here, many of which are extremely backward, bear visible hallmarks of development, like pucca houses, lanes and roads, balvadis and schools, proper drainage and sanitation, water storage tanks, etc.

Micro white revolutions

The village of Leavijiburam is witnessing a ‘white revolution’ of its own. Murugan Seethai, 45, today owns 10 cows, while her self-help group (SHG) has a total of 170 animals. Narrating the tale of how the livelihood of her family of six, and other families in the village, has been transformed for the better, she says, ?Till a few years back, I just had one cow and we used to work as daily labourers, apart from being marginal farmers. Today, I have personal savings of R10,000 and 400 grams of gold. We are also free from the clutches of local moneylenders, who used to charge us 12.5% per month as interest. Now almost all families in the village have bank accounts.? Seethai’s family income is over R8,000 and she is able to directly save R2,000 a month just from the milk business. Her SHG, which has 15 members, is now supplying about 175 litres of milk a day to Tamil Nadu Cooperative Milk Producers’ Federation. There are 15 such SHGs in this village alone, which were formed at the behest of SST. On the basis of these SHGs, local branches of public sector banks have opened accounts of the villagers, apart from providing loans, which wasn’t possible earlier for the lack of a ?basis? for opening an account.

Farm and fortune

Self-help groups are the mantra that SST has adhered to in this region to facilitate economic development. As many as 4,500 families are involved in SHGs, which dabble in activities ranging from agriculture, milk production and local cottage industries. Apart from assisting SHGs in opening bank accounts and accessing loans, SST is also involved in training members of these SHGs on the technicalities of capacity building, loan regulations, marketing and managing SHG operations, apart from training them in their respective domains. ?About six years ago, before we received support from SST, I was under a debt of R2 lakh. I don’t owe anyone anything now, and my yearly savings are around R40,000-50,000. We are provided technical support by SST and we trained at the TVS farm on the outskirts of the town in things like pesticides and soil testing,? says S Rajendran, coordinator of Nambi Farmers’ Club, one of the 34 farmer associations in the area. Each such club has 20 farmers and 12 out of these 34 clubs are registered with NABARD.

As of November 2011, SHGs in the service area had group savings of R1.2 crore and had received bank loans worth more than R4.5 crore over the past ten years. As for the farmer associations, the group savings stood at R18.5 lakh, while they had received bank loans worth R2.14 crore. This also reflects in personal bank account statistics. Out of the target of 31,449 families by the SST, 19,227 have bank accounts. Rajendran sits and talks about the improvement in yield, at a small check dam built by the SST, which diverts quite a bit of water from the local stream that earlier used to go straight into the river. Due to these check dams, a water body, the Priyakulam Tank, has been created that caters to more than 2,000 hectares of agricultural land through proper irrigation channels. The farmers in the region are primarily involved in cultivation of crops like banana, paddy, coconut, cashew nut and mango.

Livelihood and business

Going around other villages in the area, one can see similar stories of empowerment and improving economic status. Ambedkar Colony, a small Dalit settlement of 137 households under the Thalavayupuram panchayat, is a much changed and uplifted form of its former self. This village has seven SHGs with 15-19 members each. Before SST intervened, the women in the village were involved in making white powder out of regular sand and rock salt. But SST helped them organise themselves and trained them in making rangoli powder with the same raw material and managing its sales. Today, each of these SHG makes as much as 1,200 kg of rangoli powder a day, which is now supplied to shops in various towns and cities of Tamil Nadu. During peak season (mid-December to mid-January), each individual takes home as much as R500 a day, while during most of the year, the average daily take home pay is about R150.

?Four years ago, we were struggling to even get R75 a day. Now it’s easily over R150 a day per person. And average family incomes for us are now between R12,000-15,000 a month,? says 54-year-old Parvathi. Just give these women about five minutes and they can churn out copious quantities of rangoli powder of various colours, right from scratch.

The local rexine business in the Eruvadi area has also received a fillip, courtesy SST. While these rexine units existed as isolated individual entities earlier, SST intervened to establish a federation of 33 such units two years ago. As a large body, these rexine makers were able to source loans and SST also helped them in getting business from the dealers of TVS motorcycles for bike accessories. Those involved with the business say it helped them to bring up their production to the quality benchmarks required by the dealers, overall making production better, more efficient and much more profitable. Shaik Peer Mohammad, owner of one such unit, Assa Liners, says, ?There has been a 30% rise in our business. My unit used to have a turnover of about R2.25 lakh a month until two years back, which now stands at R3.5 lakh. We want SST to continue to support our federation. Their dealer contacts have substantially increased our business.? He adds that he has had to increase the labour strength from eight to 13, and is now paying each of them about R2,200 a month, 50% more than what he could pay them two years ago.

Model and macro impact

The Trust works on a model wherein about 25% of the funding for the developmental work is done by SST itself, while the remaining comes from the Tamil Nadu government and local panchayats. Overall, SST is able to leverage five to six times the money that it puts in for the projects through the government, local communities and donations. Over the years, SST has developed its own poverty index for its service areas, based on human development indicators (HDI), United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and on local demographics after discussions with the local population. When SST started working in the area, 80% of the population was below the poverty line. Today, 73% population is above the poverty line. At the macro level, SST works in 1,056 villages across four states?Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh?with Tamil Nadu taking the lion’s share of the trust’s activities, with nine out of the SST’s 13 centres located in the state.

The Trust works on five key focus areas?economic development, health and family welfare, education, environment and conservation and infrastructure. SST, which was set up 15 years ago, has spread from just two villages in Tamil Nadu to the scale that it has today, wherein it impacts more than eight lakh people. Today, more than 55% of the population under the SST project areas has an income of R10,000 a month and over 55,000 women have personal savings bank accounts. ?The idea is not to run a parallel scheme to that of the government, but to partner with them and most importantly with the local community for development and involve the members of local communities as agents of change. We work through the people themselves who are to be empowered and uplifted, so that they can take ownership of their own livelihoods and development, with our active support,? says Ashoke Joshi, chairman, SST, and a retired civil servant.

Joshi further emphasises the ?active? involvement of SST which follows a model different from most other CSR initiatives. ?We have a team of 135 people but only four are based out of our office at Chennai. The rest are on the ground, working directly with the community and residing in the villages. The simple idea behind it is that we can’t go and talk of someone’s development as outsiders. We need to be a part of the community to really make a difference. The key to change is trust, and we can only build trust if we become one of them, not as outsiders,? he adds.

Going back to the farm, the Melkerai watershed project is the latest baby of SST’s Thirukkurungudi centre. Most of the land in the extremely impoverished and backward part of the Tirunelveli district is barren and non-cultivable, except during the monsoon. Partnering a project by the agriculture ministry and International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Hyderabad, SST is helping with funds, providing field staff and farm expertise in order to make the land fertile. It’s a 1,120-hectare soil and water conservation project and aims at making the land cultivable within the next two-three years. Small shoots of leguminous black gram are spread across the vast patch of land for nitrogen fixation, which is being employed as the first step in restoring fertility. The patch is dotted with six water percolation tanks and field bundhs to recharge soil with water and to avoid erosion by the flow of rain water. These small green shoots on the reddish landscape spell hope for about 400 farmers of the area who work as labourers for most of the year. It probably is the least publicised and talked about social initiative of this scale, but that’s how TVS group chairman Venu Srinivasan prefers it. ?We always choose to avoid any sort of publicity. We are conscious of our social responsibility and that’s the only thing that concerns the way we function,? says Joshi.