What we do
How Rural Dev runs in a SEARCH village.
For farming households we organise farmer producer organisations — formal Producer Companies registered under the Companies Act — around a shared crop or commodity. The FPO aggregates produce, negotiates with buyers, runs custom hiring centres for tractors and threshers, and over time builds working capital from member share contributions and retained earnings.
We also run rural enterprise hand-holding for individual entrepreneurs — dairy, goatery, tailoring, agri-input retail — paired with linkages to bank credit, government MGNREGS works, and government livestock and agriculture department schemes.
Our approach
Four principles hold the Rural Dev work up.
Women-led federations
SHG federations are the spine of the livelihoods work. We invest disproportionately in their bookkeeping, governance, and conflict-resolution capacity.
Producer companies, not contracts
Where farmers organise, we register formal FPOs as Producer Companies — not project-bound aggregator contracts. The legal form is what gives the institution durability.
Value retention in the village
Aggregation, primary processing, and storage all happen as close to the producer as possible. Margin that used to leak to middlemen now compounds inside the village.
Patient hand-holding
A federation is durable around year five, not year one. We do not exit before the institution can run its own audits and govern itself.
Featured project
Prakasam SHG Federation
Prakasam district, Andhra Pradesh
“Eight years ago we kept our savings in tin boxes under the bed. Today the federation lends three crore rupees a year to its own members.”
M Saroja, President — Prakasam Mandal SHG Federation
Take it further