NRLM 2.0 and Samaveshi Aajeevika Yojana: Strategy to Reduce Extreme Rural Poverty

The government is launching National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) 2.0 with a focus on reducing extreme poverty by including left-out vulnerable households through initiatives like the Samaveshi Aajeevika Yojana (SAY) within the women-led SHG network.

The Context and Evolution of NRLM

• The Success of NRLM 1.0: The original mission focused on creating Self-Help Groups (SHGs) where women pooled small savings to access bank loans, known as microfinance
  • This successfully improved the economic, political, and social status of millions of women, even strengthening their voices in village panchayats.
• The Remaining Gap: A segment of rural households remains outside NRLM’s benefits due to deep structural deprivation.
  • The poorest households often cannot contribute even the minimal savings required to participate in SHGs.
  • These households frequently face housing insecurity, chronic food shortages, and serious health risks, limiting their ability to benefit from existing livelihood programmes.

NRLM 2.0 and Samaveshi Aajeevika Yojana (SAY)

• Shift in focus: NRLM 2.0 moves beyond expanding coverage to target households in extreme poverty that were previously excluded from earlier SHG-based interventions.
• SAY: The Samaveshi Aajeevika Yojana (SAY) is designed to identify and integrate the most vulnerable and left-out households into the NRLM ecosystem.
• Productive inclusion approach: Instead of relying solely on welfare transfers, the scheme emphasises asset creation, skills development, and livelihood opportunities to enable sustainable income generation.
• Pathway to sustainable livelihoods: By linking households to SHGs, credit, and government schemes, SAY aims to create a graduation pathway out of extreme poverty.

Seven Policy Recommendations for the Success of NRLM 2.0

• Decentralised State-Led Approach: The extreme poverty agenda should be state-driven with only broad central guidance, allowing districts flexibility to design context-specific strategies, as seen in Kerala’s household micro-plans through Kudumbashree and Bihar’s Jeevika graduation model.
• Committed Leadership and Political Backing: States should appoint dedicated leaders with administrative competence and social commitment, backed by strong political support, to ensure sustained focus on reducing extreme poverty.
• Strengthening SRLM Capacity and Community Institutions: NRLM 2.0 should identify pockets with high concentrations of extreme poverty and provide additional financial and human resources to strengthen SRLMs and grassroots community institutions, while partnering with credible civil society organisations where capacity is weak.
• Addressing Root Causes: Alongside household micro-plans, policies should address structural regional issues such as local economic conditions, sectoral vulnerabilities, and geographic disadvantages that perpetuate extreme poverty.
• Transparency in Identification and Measurement: The programme should publish clear definitions, identification criteria, verification processes, and monitoring mechanisms, including how slippage into poverty will be tracked.
• Entitlements as Urgent, Not the End Goal: While ensuring rapid access to welfare entitlements, the household-level engagement should also diagnose systemic gaps in service delivery and feed these insights into state policy improvements.
• Collective Local Institutional Effort: Extreme poverty reduction should be implemented through coordinated action among Panchayati Raj Institutions, Self-Help Groups, ASHA workers, anganwadi workers, and credible non-profits, ensuring a sustained and community-anchored approach rather than a purely target-driven programme.

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Conclusion

The success of NRLM 2.0 will depend not on achieving numerical targets, but on building a transparent, decentralised and community-driven system that tackles the structural roots of extreme poverty.

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