Livelihood nonprofits have no future, said a candidate during an interview I was conducting last week. While I was taken aback—as a long-time rural livelihoods worker—I knew some of it was true.

The near absence of voices from livelihoods nonprofits on the debates on farm acts 2020 has been a disconcerting phenomenon. Despite working with farmers to enhance their livelihoods for decades, and pioneering concepts like farmer producer organisations (FPOs), we are nowhere in the picture, when it comes to engaging with the government on farmers’ interests.

There are two reasons for this:

Nonprofits are only thought of providing training or relief work. When the government talks about farming, while they know about us, they do not engage with us because they believe that our work doesn’t address the issues of agriculture.

The silence around farm acts isn’t the first instance of nonprofits being disengaged.
More importantly, we, as a sector, do not engage with markets or government in a way that matters. The silence around the farm acts isn’t the first instance of nonprofits being disengaged. We weren’t involved during the 2018 kisan (farmer) long march either—the 180 km journey by foot to Mumbai by over 30,000 farmers, many of whom were marginal tribal farmers.

Why is the above important? First, because the dominant interventions of rural livelihoods nonprofits are in the farm sector. Second, outside of government, this group has the largest and arguably the most well-meaning professionals committed to farmers. These organisations also draw upon significant philanthropic and government funding which means that they must look for deeper and more meaningful engagement with the people we seek to serve.

Most importantly, it is time for us to examine our approach, especially now, because we are beginning to see the emergence of a new farming ecosystem on account of the recently introduced farm acts 2020 and schemes like PM KISAN which aims to provide direct income support to small and marginal farmers in the country.

If we are to make our work relevant to rural households, we—the rural livelihoods nonprofits—need to reinvent ourselves to contribute meaningfully to the livelihoods needs of rural India. And the question we need to ask ourselves is whether our mediation-focussed approach is becoming outdated, and crowded out by direct government support, technology, and markets.

Related article: Are livelihoods nonprofits losing their relevance?

The livelihoods landscape has changed
When livelihoods nonprofits started their work several decades ago, it was largely geared towards food sufficiency or developing land and water assets. India ranks 94th out of the 107 countries on the recently released Global Hunger Index, and some of this—indicators like stunting and wasting of children under-5 years of age—is driven by accumulated intergenerational neglect and externalities outside the farm sector.

However, when you consider efforts such as the National Food Security Act, the Mid Day Meal Scheme, and rations available through the anganwadi Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) system, that contribute to a household’s food supply, it can be argued that space for livelihood organisations to work on food sufficiency is irrelevant in large parts of India.

Over time, rural livelihoods nonprofits have focussed on mobilisation, training, and adoption of practices required to achieve the stated goal of food sufficiency and modest income gains. However, even here, we didn’t create any significant impact. A study done by Tushaar Shah et al in 2012, highlighted that livelihood nonprofits, at best, brought only marginal income gains to participant households.

This was also because few nonprofits ventured into developing the agricultural value chain and it was even rarer to see us engage with issues of markets or other structural problems such as the viability of football field-size farms.

We also believed that poorer geographies had what we called the ‘antenna challenge’, where communities were unable to tune into public policy and market signals, and mediation was required to translate government policies and schemes into opportunities like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme. This, however, is not true anymore. This government’s high-intensity outreach efforts have resulted in people being aware of their rights and entitlements in most cases. There is also near-universal coverage of the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) and commercial start-ups have started delivering a range of services including crop advisories and real-time meteorological advice to farmers.