Livelihoods of rural communities in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand are primarily subsistence oriented and largely dependent on agriculture, livestock and forest linkages. Very small and fragmented land holdings, reliance on traditional crop varieties and livestock breeds and rapid degradation of common property resources contribute to the incidence and degree of poverty. Uttarakhand faces a huge challenge in promoting livelihoods in rural environments due to lack of infrastructure, public facilities and problems in retaining quality human resources in rural areas. Though there is a network of banks and post offices in the state for providing financial services (mainly savings/deposits and money transfer), poor households of remote and inaccessible villages are still not able to access these credit services. The support expected from these formal financial institutions towards the SHGs is also minimal.
Community institutions such as Self-Help Groups and Federations have proven to be an effective means of financial inclusion by providing the poor households with an opportunity to save regularly, and ready access to credit for consumption and production needs. Further, livelihood enterprises through federations help in aggregation of small quantum of produce, add value to produce and negotiate with markets and suppliers for better prices. Himmotthan’s past work has demonstrated successful community institution led enterprises in various project areas. The same is now planned to be up-scaled with a focus on increased outreach of membership of federations, diversification of federation led businesses, growth in volumes and profitability and an increased access to financial services through SHGs and federations.
To achieve the above objectives, Himmotthan has adopted a multi-pronged strategy for the economic empowerment of the rural poor and women.

Himmotthan began integrating microfinance with its programmes in 2009-10, with the objective to incorporate community based microfinance into different programmes. The Community Institution structure developed and supported by Himmotthan focuses on providing an institutional platform to find out new market opportunities with product diversification. Village level groups (SHGs) provides credit support to the members to enhance the production and cluster level institution find opportunities to collect the surplus, value addition of aggregated produce and marketing of produce with maintaining quality and quantity indicators. Himmotthan’s approach is to strengthen the entire value chain with providing technical knowledge on productivity enhancement and establishing market-based enterprise models at one dimension and on the other hand building a cadre of local youth to provide door step service delivery mechanism to villagers. The major components of this initiatives are as below:

Key Achievements

1. Outreach :Community institution program of Himmotthan is benefitting 87,000 households of 1,626 villages from 11 districts of Uttarakhand, 02 districts of Himachal and Leh district of Ladakh. The institutional structure developed and supported by Himmotthan is having a strength of over 5,000 Self Help Groups (SHGs), 50 Self Reliant Cooperatives (SRCs) with 42,000 Women members with combination of empowerment and entrepreneurship
2. Access to credit (Financial inclusion and rotation of money) :The community institutions having a sufficient amount of credit surplus of Rs. 3,585 Lakh to promote production enhancement and individual small enterprises at village level and group-based enterprises at SRC level. The increasing members inter-loan in proportion of SRC enterprises related to agriculture and allied sector is a sign of building business relationships of SHGs and SRCs
3. Entrepreneurship :Self-Reliant Cooperatives are operating and managing 29 Micro dairies, 32 Farmers Facility Centres (CFCs), 12 Animal Feed cum Agro-processing units with a business turnover of Rs. 3,587 lakhs. 41 SRCs are also engaged in marketing of agriculture produces and Individual small-scale poultry, goatery and off farm-based enterprises at SHG level having major adoption ratio. Institutions are catering the substance amount of milk and dairy products of local markets and as well establishing them as seed production and supply firms to government seed agencies, promoting rural tourism, brand promotion and marketing of homegrown agriculture and allied products
4. Support Mechanism :A cadre of trained youth workforce of 434 women and 678 men is established in the community to provide their paid on-farm and off-farm technical services to the farmers at the door steps
5. Building Linkages :Community institutions program received good recognition from government departments and build a healthy rapt with State Rural Livelihood Mission, JICA funded Uttarakhand Forest Resources Management Program and IFAD funded Integrated Livelihood Support Project and Himmotthan is being working with state government as technical resource agency in implementing these projects in Bageshwar, Chamoli, Pauri, Tehri and Rudraprayag

A joint declaration signed by the Tata Group (Tata Trusts, Tata Consultancy Services and Tata Strive) with the Government of Uttarakhand (GoUK) on July 19, 2017 in which a joint skilling and livelihoods initiative was agreed upon. The project will be implemented in collaboration with the Uttarakhand Rural Livelihood Mission (URLM) in 5 blocks, across 5 districts covering 1,000 villages. Skilling programs will include on- and off-farm enterprises like agri-produce, dairy and livestock, handicrafts and rural marketing. Collective production, processing and marketing of produce and products will create self-employment, embedded enterprises and develop a culture of entrepreneurship in the rural areas of the state. Himmotthan will be responsible for the overall monitoring and governance of the initiative.