RFP: HCLFoundation, under its flagship programme Samuday, invites proposals for ‘impact assessment of key projects across agriculture and livelihood’
Last date for submission 12th March 2024
REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL (HCLF/RFP/Samuday/Agri&Liv/20022024) HCLFoundation, under its flagship programme Samuday, invites proposals for ‘impact assessment of key projects across agriculture and livelihood’ in Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh.
HCLFOUNDATION HCLFoundation delivers the corporate social responsibility agenda of HCLTech in India through its flagship programmes and special initiatives. It is a not-for-profit organisation that strives to contribute towards national and international development goals, bringing about lasting positive impact in the lives of people, through long-term sustainable programmes.
HCLFoundation aims to alleviate poverty and achieve inclusive growth and development. Active community engagement ensures optimal long-term gains and upward accountability. It works through Life Cycle Based, Integrated Community Development Approach with a thematic focus on Education, Health, Skill Development and Livelihood, Environment, and Disaster Risk Reduction and Response. Child protective strategies, inclusion, and gender transformative approaches remain central in all initiatives of HCLFoundation, thus ensuring comprehensive development. At present, HCLFoundation is implementing five flagship programmes, Samuday and HCLTech Grant – Rural Development programmes; Uday and My Clean City – Urban Development programmes; Harit – Environment Action programme and 4 special initiatives – Power of One, Sports for Change, Academy and My E-Haat.
For more details, please visit our website – https://www.hclfoundation.org
VISION To be the source code for sustainable socio-economic and environmental development.
MISSION Nurture clean, green and healthy communities where everyone is empowered and equipped to reach their full potential in partnership with its employees, communities and stakeholders, 2 while promoting volunteerism and establishing international standards of strategic planning, execution and measuring impact.
Link HCLFoundation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMgq4fHTwAA
Samuday by HCLFoundation, is an outcome of HCL’s commitment to uplift rural India. Established in 2015, Samuday intends to develop a sustainable, scalable, and replicable model – a source code for economic and social development of rural areas in partnership with State Governments, local communities, NGOs, knowledge institutions and allied partners. We do this through optimal interventions across Agriculture, Education, Environment, Health, Livelihood, and WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) in selected villages.
The program is designed to help the local people identify their problems, co-create solutions, and then implement the same on their own with professional support from team Samuday, thereby, lending the dimension of sustainability and ownership to the vision of development. Currently implemented in Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh and Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu, Samuday is operational in 619 gram panchayats.
RFP released by HCLFoundation
RFP code HCLF/RFP/Samuday/Agri&Liv/20022024
Programme name Samuday
Date of posting 20th February 2024
Last date for submission 12 th March 2024
Location Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh
Request for Proposal
1. Description of RFP
Agriculture is the backbone of rural economy. Majority of the population in rural areas of India are dependent on traditional types of farming and growing traditional crops. In Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh, HCLFoundation is involved in capacity building and progression of small and marginal farmers who have limited land holding of less than one acre. The need for interventions in agriculture was found to be extremely essential due to lack of awareness, lack of infrastructural facility, lack of knowledge and depravity of quality input support among the farming community. Moreover, a major portion of the land in this area was sodic in nature, which further reduced the overall production from the small piece of land. The farmers were also involved in conventional cultivation methods of crop cultivation. HCLFoundation initiated to work with marginal farmers in the year 2015 with 517 famers within one development block of Kachhauna. Throughout the years, more geography and farmers have been associated with the agricultural interventions of Samuday with the current number around 93,000 farmers across eleven development blocks and 500+ gram panchayats. Organization has intervened in various areas of farm and land agriculture, such as food security programme, crop diversification, land reclamation and restoration, farm mechanization, nutrition garden and few other diverse fields.
Through Samuday’s Dairy Development project, we have been able to create an alternative source of livelihood and increase the income of marginalized milk producers in 280 villages of Hardoi district in Uttar Pradesh. Presently 290 dairy associations are functional, benefiting more than 25,000 farmers and collecting an average of 100,000 litres milk per day, through forward linkage partnership with industry leaders.
We are also working on different aspects of dairy farming through farmer trainings on best practices in dairy management; veterinary camps like preventive health camp, fertility improvement program (FIP) camps, feed and fodder demonstration etc.
The purpose of the RFP is to assess the impact of the major interventions being implemented by HCL Samuday across the 11 development blocks of Hardoi district for income enhancement and capacity building of marginal farmers in agriculture sector. The impact assessment of dairy will be done in the base blocks only.
Objective: Samuday has been implementing various agricultural interventions with marginal farmers for the last 9 years. These were initiated at pilot level with a limited number of farmers, followed by significant findings and positive responses from the community. These were then scaled up to a larger number of farmers and have reached a level which is showing a considerable amount of development and change. Hence this calls for an assessment to understand the actual scale and level of change that Samuday has been able to create within the farming community and agriculture sector development since the inception of these projects.
An integrated and sustainable milk production and milk marketing system through farmer’s organization for enhancing the income of small and marginal dairy producers has been established by Samuday. There are internal documents made by the team in due course of the intervention to depict the progress and impact of the intervention on various parameters. The need of the project at present is external analysis of the impact created and reporting of the structures evolved serving as a benchmark to provide the teams an opportunity for gap-analysis.
Project Brief Down the line, as the programs started implementation full-fledged in various blocks of the district, ample amount of data has been captured and collected. Various monitoring and implementation reports were generated internally to evaluate the efficiency and scalability of the program as per desired output. Even with these internal evaluations, now a need has been felt to analyze the interventions of agricultural sector and Dairy intervention through some external sources so that an unbiased analysis can be conducted to find out the impact of the project.
The agricultural sector is working on both on-farm and off-farm activities as follows:
1. Food Security Project: Promotion of cultivation of traditional crops through recommended Package of Practices, thus enhancing crop productivity through sustained agriculture practices and achieving food security to the farmer and family
2. Vegetable cultivation: Promoting sustainable income enhancement opportunities through cultivation of vegetable crops which fetch better market prices, within a limited period of time
3. Nano Orchard: A small area of land devoted exclusively for cultivation of fruit crops like guava, banana, etc.
4. Floriculture: Designed to bring about a change in the cropping pattern of the region while promoting flower rearing
5. VASUNDRA: An initiative undertaken to assist a marginal farmer to reap benefits from highly degraded wasteland post proper land development and suitable crop cultivation
6. Nutrition Garden: A low cost, scientific model of home garden which will support rural households with a variety of nutritious and organic vegetables throughout the year
7. Farm Mechanization: Increasing the income of farmers by improving affordability and accessibility of machines for land and crop management through a crop cycle
8. Training and extension: Dissemination of advanced knowledge and information to the Community, thus ensuring its further outreach and application
A brief on Dairy Intervention
Dairy In the rural areas, almost every household with focus on milking animal which includes cattle and buffalo rearing. The revenue generated through milk sales is an important source of income that attributed to the livelihood of people. With the objective of enhancing farmers income, HCLFoundation initiated the dairy development program, this program focused on promoting institutions for channelized milk marketing by federating dairy farmers into suitable institutions and creating a strong chain between production, collection and marketing. The dairy development project initiated in 2016-17 with 238 farmers, entered into partnership with Banas in 2019 for milk marketing and currently HCLFoundation is working with more than 25,000+ farmers for the holistic dairy development in both forward and backward linkages.
3. Scope of Work The objectives of the service provider would be to document the selected intervention of the agricultural/dairy development program in the selected geography. The heads under which the documentation reports of the intervention have to be developed are as follows:
1) Performing detailed surveys in the project area and reporting the real-time number of direct beneficiaries benefitted from both the intervention under the purview of the project
2) Defining the parameters and development of tools and estimating the numbers of indirect beneficiaries from agriculture and dairy (price realization from milk sales)
3) Performing a financial feasibility study of agricultural and dairy interventions, cost- benefit analysis on the basis of economic and social benefits from the agriculture and dairy sector 5
4) Performing an overall impact analysis of all the interventions (Qualitative as well as Quantitative) 5) Analyzing and subsequently issuing distinct reports for Agriculture and Dairy
6) Associating the results of the interventions to specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), thus providing a holistic achievement of these interventions to the community and society
Apart from the assessment of the impact created by direct activities mentioned in the table, this study also aims to capture the impact that the agricultural & dairy interventions is bringing indirectly in the living standards of the registered farmers’ households.
