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and makes an effort to dialogue with producer companies, their boards, members and other
stakeholders, especially the promoting institutions in different states including some of the
resource agencies.
Chapter 6, ‘Skilling India: An Aspirational Challenge’, puts the spotlight on skill
development by presenting a picture of the present education and employment scenario,
framework of initiatives to address the skill challenge, targets set for skilling by the government
and a brief analysis of the major programmes for skill development and the results.
Chapter 7, ‘Non-farm Sector Enterprises and Employment’, looks at the key trends in the
non-farm sector. Apart from an in-depth coverage of handloom, handicraft, khadi and village
industries, other non-farm sector activities have been briefly touched upon.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a statutory responsibility for the Indian
companies with the passing of the Companies Act, 2013. Chapter 8 looks at the private sector
engagement in livelihoods and CSR through an analysis of CSR policies of a few companies,
interventions of a few large corporates in the sphere of livelihoods, aggregate funding under
CSR and challenges in the manner of companies engaging themselves in CSR. It looks at the
10 top-ranked companies in CSR and the range of activities that they engage in.
Bringing together the SOIL Report every year is an arduous task, given the complexity
and diversity of issues, stakeholders and initiatives that need to be understood and analysed.
While in the past we relied on a core group of authors to bring together the publication, to give
the publication a greater cohesion and seamlessness across the report, a bold departure has
been made during the year. ACCESS invited Girija and N. Srinivasan to write the full report.
Given their great experience of many years and having earlier authored important ACCESS
publications, this was well worth exploring. I’m glad that the two could pull it off and we have
a well analysed report that takes into its sweep all the factors that influence opportunities for
the poor. I thank them for this great effort.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Rabobank Foundation, particularly Arindom
for his continued support to the report and for reposing the faith in the ability of ACCESS to
deliver on this critical sectoral report.
From within ACCESS, I would also like to thank my own team anchored by Ram for the
support they provided to the process. Puja and Ila and the state teams ably supported the effort.
After a break of one year, we are going back to SAGE for publishing this report and I hope
that with our combined efforts, we are able to reach an ever-increasing readership this year.
Vipin Sharma
CEO
ACCESS Development Services
New Delhi
