By Deepti Ameta | In Charge Resource Mobilization Program
Dear Friends,
Happy Holiday Season!
Hope you are enjoying the holiday season. This year the winter started a little later here but it is pleasantly cold right now. We hope it is also nice weather where you are.
Thank you for supporting the village communities of Rajasthan. Building self reliant rural communities is an essential feature of the Village Institution Program of Seva Mandir. Therefore, the Gram Vikas Kosh (GVK) or the Village Development Fund is an innovative concept of Seva Mandir, which aims to build social solidarities that enable villagers to organize themselves, express their demands and needs, and work towards their fulfilment.
This is done through the creation and management of a village level fund, formed from people’s contributions. Then the Gram Vikas Committees (GVC), democratically elected, non-party and non-religiously affiliated citizen associations are set up in villages. These committees are provided with a number of trainings in good governance, management and community leadership. These committees hold the GVKs.
Currently there are 596 Village Development Funds/corpus (GVKs) with a collective fund of approximately Rs. 3 Crores (Rs. 30 million). The village corpus is kept in both a savings account and a fixed deposit account and the interest generated from these are uttilized by the community to take care of the various developmental issues in their village.
The interest generated from the corpus is also used by the village committees to provide loans to support livelihoods, the purchase of community assets like: utensils, threshers, lift irrigation pumps etc. and the management and protection of village commons like: pasture lands, schools and community centre/hall maintenance.
Some of the committees have been extremely successful in managing their corpus funds and are paying for the services provided by the village volunteers. They are also supporting the costs for some administrative costs solely from the interest earned from their corpus. Therefore these committees are moving towards a more decentralized process of functioning by also beginning to support their own developmental activities, increasing membership of women and children in the decision making processes.
A detailed report on the progress made in this program during the last six months (April to September 2010) is enclosed for your kind reference.
We are delighted to share the exciting progress these rural communities are making. Thank you for being a consistent partner to us. Please take a look at the report and let us know if you have any questions. We hope you would love to read this update at this holiday season.
Many thanks once again. Happy Holiday Season to you once again from all of us here.
With warm regards,
Deepti
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