An interactive session was held with the top officials of ESAF Small Finance Bank, Grant Thronton Bharat (GT-Bharat) and KIIT-Technology Business Incubator (KIIT-TBI) on the concept of the Local Economic Development (LED) model on 13th May, 2024. The objective of the meeting was to understand in details the concept, implementation, and operational viability of the LED model, proposed to be implemented by KIIT-TBI with the technical support of GT-Bharat.
In the beginning of the meeting, Shri. Samarendra Sahu, Advisor, KIIT-TBI extended a warm welcome to Mr. Ghosh and Mr. Jeevan Kumar Sahoo from ESAF Bank, as well as to Mr. Manoj Kharb from GT Bharat.
Mr. Kharb mentioned that the LED model of cluster development is being implemented across 6 states of India covering 120 clusters. Each such cluster consists of a producer company formed by 500-600 women farmers located in the villages of the cluster. The model revolves around four concepts such as; agglomeration, convergence, business development services, and capacity building/knowledge transfer. Mr. Kharb mentioned that four Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) have achieved a revenue of INR 1 Cr in the last financial year 2023-24 and it is envisaged to benefit nearly 3000-4000 farmers located in the vicinity of the cluster and augment their income by 25-50% over a 3-year implementation period
The presentation was followed by online interaction with the Board of Directors of two FPCs – Samarpita Women Farmer Producer Company Limited, Puri and Belleview Farmer Producer Company, Dhenkanal.
Mr. Ghosh wanted to understand from the board members how they succeeded in mobilizing the farmer members of the company and the sources of finance for various activities of the company.
Mr. Narayan Khuntia, GT member form the Dhenkanal team and Mr. Subrat Sethi, GT member from Puri team explained that the farmers were mobilized through the village heads with the help of a number of awareness and sensitization programmes. The financing of the company was managed from the corpus of funds collected as share capital of the farmers as well as through loan from the State Bank of India, HDFC Bank and NBFCs.
Mr. Jeevan Sahoo put forth a query to understand the initial and intermediate financial supports that is being made available to the PFCs including any sort of government support.
Mr. Kharb of GT Bharat informed that the initial financial requirement for the FPCs for setting up of the cluster, mobilization of the farmers and alignment with facilitators like Godrej Agrovet, BAYERS and others would be made from share capital of the farmer members, CSR support, and loans and advances from the local banks.
There would be also possibilities of convergence with suitable government schemes and programs to undertake the activities like seed production, MSP procurement, primary and secondary processing, technology integration, and other farm and non-farm activities.
In his concluding remarks, Mr. Samarendra Sahu, Advisor, KIIT-TBI, expressed his optimism to implement LED model in selected blocks of Odisha to start with technical support from GT Bharat and CSR support from ESAF Small Finance Bank. He made a mention of the fact that KIIT-TBI is having adequate experience of grass level implementation of schemes/programs for grassroot level intervention such as SFURTI scheme of MSME), which would come handy in implementing the LED model with the technical support of GT, which has been already in to the implementation of LED model in six states of the country. He also pointed out that the implementation of LED model through ESAF Bank CSR support would help in popularizing the activities of ESAF Bank in rural areas adopting the LED model.
The meeting ended with a vote of thanks by Mr. Debashis Tripathy, Senior Manager, SFURTI vertical, KIIT TBI.