The State has received a shot in the arm to boost its efforts to enhance agricultural incomes of small and marginal farmers and ensure increased access related to health, nutrition, sanitation and social entitlements.
The World Bank has approved $ 75 million credit for the Andhra Pradesh Rural Inclusive Growth Project, a project designed with focus on increasing economic opportunities for small and marginal farmers, especially from SC and ST households, covering 5,000 villages in 150 most backward mandals. As part of the implementation, investments would be made in developing a network of social enterprises for food, nutrition, sanitation and other social enterprises operating at community and district-level.
The project would support the government in its efforts at creating an enabling policy framework with real time analytics across sectors through the various missions established. On the human development front, investments would be made in improving access to services in health, nutrition, water & sanitation.
The AP Rural Inclusive Growth Project envisaged linking of small and marginal farmers to urban markets and make them competitive across the value chain so that they would be able to take advantage of potential benefits from allied sectors like horticulture, livestock and fisheries. Investments would be made in increasing nutritional content of products like milk, vegetables and poultry.
The project would specifically support in increasing incomes of 2.5 lakh small & marginal farmers by at least 50 per cent by enhancing productivity and improving their access to markets. Focus would be on producers who have built up productive assets and have the potential to exploit growth opportunities for high value commodities including red gram, milk, poultry, small ruminants, fisheries, turmeric, cashew and coffee.
The project is also aimed at working towards improving the coverage and service delivery of social protection entitlements for 5 lakh poorest households, mainly hailing from SC/ST communities. One of the key aspects of the project was to invigorate and create local markets by connecting rural producers and enterprises with rural consumers. Another major feature would be enhancing the quality of consumption by poor households by making nutrient rich snacks available through nutria-shops and creating awareness on the benefits of these products.
Emphasis would also be on the human development side with community led approaches to improve access to water and sanitation services in about 1,000 targeted villages adopting saturation mode to cover all households and rural institutions like schools, anganwadi and health centres besides helping them achieve open defecation free status. The efforts would be underpinned by significant investments in ICT and mobile-based service delivery systems for social accountability, better targeting, increased transaction efficiency and effectiveness.
