Hill-state livelihoods, locally rooted.
Rural skill and livelihood programmes co-designed with the Uttarakhand Rural-Urban Skill Livelihood mission — across nine hill districts.
Project brief
Uttarakhand has a livelihood problem that is not a livelihood problem at all — it is a logistics problem, dressed up as one. Skill exists. Material exists. Buyers exist. What is missing is the connective tissue. Our work with URSL set out to build that tissue, one district at a time.
Across fourteen months we designed and ran a hill-specific curriculum that respected three realities: short working seasons, scattered village geography, and the second job (farm, family) that every participant carries alongside the new one.
"You designed a programme for a hill woman, not for a city woman who happens to live in a hill." — a district-level supervisor.
The first cohort produced a costed catalogue of forty-eight products across textiles, food and home — and, importantly, a logistics map of village-to-cluster-to-Dehradun-to-Delhi that the programme now uses by default.
Phase two is in design. It will expand to three new districts and pilot a small e-commerce assist for participants who clear quality review.
Photographs from the project.
Real photographs will replace these placeholders in the next phase.