Thursday, March 25, 2010

Inception Workshop on Convergence of Agricultural Interventions in Maharashtra 22nd to 26th of September 2009



Objectives of the workshop:
• To develop a comprehensive understanding about CAIM programme among the shortlisted partner organizations
• Ensuring Organizations thoroughly understand each sub component of CAIM
• Enable them to understand and develop the end to end sub projects to be implemented with the rural communities for livelihood promotion

The CAIM workshop was conducted in sprawling campus of government of Maharashtra’s training centre “Prabodini” in Amravati. Total 118 participants from 68 NGOs and private companies participated in the workshop. The schema of the five days workshop is as follows: The first day initiated with the welcome address and spelling out of the purpose of the workshop by Mr. Ganesh Neelam. A warm welcome was given by all participants to the dignitaries present in the dais. They were Dr. Goel, IAS, Principal Secretary, GoM; Mr Nawin Sona, IAS, Programme Director, CAIM ; Dr. Vincent Darlong, Acting Country Representative, IFAD; Dr Alam, Consultant, IFAD; Mr. Arun Pandhi, Programmes Manager, SRTT; Mr. Poreddyvar, Advisor, MSAMB, Dr. Toshniwal, General Manager, MSAMB; Mr. Ganesh Neelam, Executive Director, CInI. After giving an understanding of the context of the agrarian distress in Vidarbha Mr. Neelam welcomed Mr. Nawin who gave a detailed overview of the entire CAIM programme. Mr. Nawin emphasized the importance of the programme for the region and its design elements along with the strong monitoring aspects. Dr. Alam in his presentation went deeper on understanding of various contours of the CAIM project with respect to various programmatic and finance related components. He further explained the roles of various stake holders of the project like the PMU, PSU and NGOs. An introduction to the concept of sub projects was given by Mr. Narendra Kande. Dr. Goel chaired the open house session in which lots of doubts of the participants related to the CAIM were cleared. Next day onwards an orientation on the key components of the programme were given by the experts and implementers. Two parallel sessions on Institution Building (SHG-CMRC, VDCs) and INRM were conducted. Similar sessions were held on the third day. In day four the themes on Convergence, Producers Company and Livestock were dealt by various practitioners, academicians and researchers. A discussion on the format of the sub-project circulated to the participants was done by experts and their queries raised were addressed. Subgroups were prepared for discussion on the sub-projects. Day five was initiated with the presentation of sub-groups. Dr. Alam made an elaborate presentation on the queries that the participants had during the workshop. This was followed by the concluding session which was chaired by Mr. N. Nawin Sona.