HCL Foundation to Transform Rural Development in Jharkhand with Samuday

Ranchi: HCL Foundation today announced that it will implement its transformational rural development program – HCL Samuday – in Jharkhand through a partnership with Srijan Foundation (SF). HCL Samuday is an integrated rural development program that works towards creating a scalable and replicable development model for rural India. In Jharkhand, HCL Samuday together with Srijan Foundation will design and implement sustainable interventions across Education, Livelihood, WASH and Health. As the first step, interventions across the three areas will be implemented in the blocks of Daru, Tati Jhariya, and Ichak in the Hazaribagh district.

Interventions across the four areas will include:

· Education – improving school infrastructure and the environment:

o Address challenges like lack of functional toilets, labs, library, interactive classrooms, chairs, and other necessities.

o Create innovative solutions for combating poor school processes, limited school readiness, and preschool activities, stemming drop-out rates and lack of child-friendly learning.

o ‘Train the Trainer’ programs for capacity building of cluster coordinators and block officials.

o Increasing literacy in rural women as poor literacy, numeracy skills and lack of awareness leads to long-term challenges for adolescent girls and women.

· Health category – improving Health Infrastructure as a priority area:

o Current infrastructure is inadequate to address the health care needs of the local population. Targeted initiatives will aim to solve the problems of number, state, and patient readiness of the Health Infrastructure.

o Create awareness on women’s health, menstrual hygiene, nutritional needs, and childcare.

· WASH – improving infrastructure and driving behavior change

o Implement community-led ‘Total Sanitation’ strategy to motivate households to build and use toilets.

o Making clean drinking water available and accessible to all and support for the development of piped drinking water supply.

· Livelihood – understand the locally available resources and improve the value chains of produce

o Ensuring relevant backward and forward linkages support for the market, thereby increasing income of families and leading to income augmentation in the vicinity.

Commenting on the expansion, Alok Varma, Project Director of HCL Foundation, said: “HCL Samuday has already established a scalable, sustainable, and successful model for rural development reaching out to over 9 lakh people across 11 blocks in Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh and Kultali block of 24 South Parganas district in West Bengal. We are now happy to extend this model to Jharkhand with the help of Srijan Foundation, our partner who will help implement our plans of outreach in the areas of Education, Livelihood, WASH and Health. We are confident that together we will be able to drive accelerated impact to help improve people’s lives in the state.”

Swapan Manna, Secretary of Srijan Foundation said, “I feel privileged and excited to be a part of the HCL Samuday program. We have selected 203 villages in three blocks – Daru, Tatijharia, and Ichak – that are inhabited by the marginalized section of the society, and the project will enable us to adopt a systematic process for the development of these marginalized communities through strategies like collectivization, mobilization, capacity building and awareness generation. We aim to promote the inclusion of these marginalized communities in the mainstream development process. The project overall empowers the communities to take agency and control over the development process for their benefit.”

Over the past six years, HCL Samuday has created a model of integrated and sustainable village development focused on five core areas – Agriculture, Education, Health, Environment, Livelihood, and WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene). It works with local communities to identify problems, co-create solutions, and then implement them with professional support, thereby, lending the dimension of sustainability and ownership to the overall development agenda. HCL Samuday currently works in eleven blocks of Hardoi district in Uttar Pradesh and has delivered a visible, measurable impact on improving the standard of life and livelihood opportunities for over 9 lakh people in the 1299 villages where it operates. It also recently expanded its footprint in the State of West Bengal with initial projects in South Parganas district.