Call for Partners to Conduct a Livelihood Aspirations Study in Raichur
CSEI-ATREE is working with local partners to restore degraded lands in Karnataka’s Raichur district.
Karishma Shelar and Aditya Maruvada
In Karnataka’s Raichur district, CSEI-ATREE is starting to work alongside local partners to restore degraded lands in the region. As part of this work, it is important for us to ensure that the restoration programme remains demand-based and accounts for the inter-generational views and aspirations of farmers. What does this mean and why does it need to be prioritised?
The state of Indian agriculture today signals the need for a demand-oriented approach that can enable rural communities to improve their quality of life and livelihoods (by reducing their vulnerability to risks), while protecting the environment. In this blog post, we explain the context of agrarian distress our work fits in and the rationale behind a rural livelihood aspirations study.
We are also looking to engage with institutions (or individuals) who can take on the task of conducting this study; the scope of work is listed here and at the end of this post. Apply for this position here.
Degradation & ‘distress-driven diversification’
More than 50% of India’s population will remain predominantly rural over the next decade, deriving their livelihood from land and livestock. However, nearly 30% of India’s natural assets are undergoing degradation, threatening the bedrock of India’s food and livelihood security. A large majority of this rural population belongs to the small and marginal category; they are even more vulnerable and prone to risks stemming from the degeneration of natural assets.
The central government has launched livelihood-based programs and policies to enhance rural incomes. However, extreme weather events, such as floods and droughts are severely impacting the already vulnerable and rendering these programmes insufficient.
Read | The ‘Ground Truth’: Understanding Land Degradation in Raichur
Moreover, a recent report on agricultural households by the central government’s National Statistical Office said that less than 40% of the household income is derived from crop production and 10% from ‘animal agriculture’. These predominantly land and livelihood-based households only make up for 39% of the ‘agricultural’ households surveyed. The rest are mainly dependent on daily wage activities or labour.
These worrying figures suggest a process of ‘distress-driven diversification’ and migration from rural areas to peri-urban and urban areas. While a number of studies on ‘distress migration’ have been conducted over the years, only a few document and map the ‘aspirations’ of these people, often resulting in an incongruence between the goals of ‘vision based’ development and the actual needs of people on the ground.
Why an aspiration study is important for restoration work in Raichur
As CSEI-ATREE begins to work on restoration programmes in Raichur, accounting for local preferences and needs is a critical first step. Through a better understanding of what’s driving those who wish to remain in agriculture and those who have migrated for socio-economic reasons, it becomes possible to provide necessary services and opportunities for their livelihood enhancement, including agro-tech and RE solutions.
Read | Mapping Greening & Browning in Chikkaballapur
This study will achieve better knowledge of existing impact pathways and point to new avenues. Understanding local preferences and needs will also help us determine end-user demand for services most suitable to the lived conditions and aspirations of marginal agro-ecological and socio-economic communities.
How we plan to carry out demand-side analysis
We have identified two sets of tools to conduct demand-side analysis that will complement the socio-economic profile of the district. We plan to conduct these assessments based on the aspirational studies framework presented by the economist Kai Mausch (illustrated in the figure below). This is because we now understand that livelihood strategies pursued by agrarian households are not merely economic in nature, but arise from and are a function of a combination of opportunities, affordances (which include cultural and material aspects), know-how from their social networks and the need to diversify based on different sources of risk.
The results of these assessments will be complemented with a social network mapping (SNM) exercise, which will help identify power relations and the flow of information within a landscape between social actors and groups critical for implementation.
Scope of Work
We are seeking an institution to conduct the following activities:
- Design household surveys adopted from (Dilley et al., 2021; Mausch, Harris and Revilla Diez, 2021)’s aspirations framework for select villages in the Raichur district of Karnataka with the objective to understand local aspirations and demand for land-based livelihoods in the district and the dependencies and attachments to agriculture.
- Identify research sites and sampling methodologies.
- Conduct a social network analysis for the desired geographies.
- Identify the best available applications or technology for data collection, sensitive to research ethics.
- Implement household surveys for at least 300 households in the district to characterise household needs and preferences to map aspirations using predefined livelihood-based assessment questions
- Identify the socio-cultural and demographic heterogeneity of the local population and their economic activities by creating a typology of farmer households in the district.
- Identify their livelihood decision-making process — their challenges, strategies for sustenance and their socio-economic dependencies on the local formal and informal social networks.
- Identify market-based and local drivers shaping the economic decisions of the households.
- Analyse and assess the results of the data collection based on narratives shared by the households.
- Submit a report outlining local context, methodology and methods adopted and results of the assessment.
- Co-author blogs to share progress, method adopted, data collected and results of the final analysis of the aspirational studies.
Timelines
Duration: 3 months for completing data collection and analysis and two months for analysis and interpretations.
An intermediate report on the aspirational framework design and data collection methodology due on Sep 30, 2022.
Intermediate results due on Nov 15, 2022. Final report due on Dec 20, 2022.
Edited by Kaavya Kumar
You can read more about CSEI and the scope of this work here. Apply here.
Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay updated about our work.
If you would like to collaborate with us outside of this project or position, write to csei.collab@atree.org. We would love to hear from you.
