Governance
Start-Up Village Entrepreneurship Programme
- 11 Sep 2020
- 4 min read
Why in News
Women Self Help Groups (SHGs) under the Start-Up Village Entrepreneurship Programme (SVEP) stepped up as effective frontline responders and reached the last mile ensuring an immediate relief to the rural communities and the most vulnerable population during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
Key Points
- SVEP is a sub-scheme of the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihood Mission (DAY-NRLM), Ministry of Rural Development and has been implemented since 2016.
- Progress: It has extended business support services and capital infusion to 153 blocks of 23 states as of August 2020.
- Partner: Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII), Ahmedabad is the technical support partner of SVEP.
- EDII is an autonomous and not-for-profit institute, set up in 1983.
- It is sponsored by apex financial institutions like the IDBI Bank Ltd., IFCI Ltd., ICICI Bank Ltd. and the State Bank of India (SBI).
- It has been assigned the task of setting up Entrepreneurship Development Centers in Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, etc. by the Ministry of External Affairs.
- It aims to:
- Support the rural poor to come out of poverty.
- Support the people to set up enterprises and provide support until the enterprises stabilise.
- Providing self-employment opportunities with financial assistance and training in business management and soft skills.
- Create local community cadres for promotion of enterprises.
- Features:
- It addresses three major pillars of rural start-ups namely finances, incubation and skill ecosystems.
- It promotes both individual and group enterprises, majorly in manufacturing, trading and service sectors.
- It invests on building the capacities of the entrepreneurs to run the businesses profitably based on the local demand and ecosystem.
- Investments are also made on the use of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to create standard E-learning modules for minimizing the transmission loss in technical aspects like a business plan and profit and loss account preparations.
- Activities: Activities under SVEP are strategically designed to promote rural enterprises with a few key areas.
- One of the key areas is to develop a pool of Community Resource Persons-Enterprise Promotion (CRP-EP) who are local and support entrepreneurs setting-up rural enterprises.
- Another key area is to promote the Block Resource Center (BRC) in SVEP blocks, to monitor and manage the community resource persons, appraise SVEP loan applications and act as the repository of enterprise-related information in the concerned block.
- BRCs play the role to support a sustainable revenue model to operate effectively and independently.
- SVEP established local markets/rural haat which motivated entrepreneurs to take up demand-based production, advertise their enterprise and increase earning opportunities.
- A typical rural haat is mostly indigenous, flexible and multi-layered structure which accommodates the economic activities of various nature.
- Local market/haat/bazaar serves as an important economic platform where a range of products is traded.
- Steps Taken to Fight Covid-19:
- Women SHGs helped in producing several quality products like masks, protective gear kits, sanitizers and cleaning products across the country.
- Some of the women SHGs were involved in running community kitchens and served cooked meals to over 5.72 crore vulnerable community members.
