Income Generation Among the Women Members of SHGs Through Dairy Enterprise in District Bulandshahar, Uttar Pradesh

Dairy as a commercial enterprise is an established venture from income generation perspective. Present study was conducted to investigate the SHG women's involvement in dairy as a business, awareness about different aspects of dairying, income generated, constraint faced and also the future prospects. Data was collected and synthesized fora large sample of 2864 rural women representing 247 SHGs across 63 villages under four blocks of the district. All the SHGs (average number of members 10–15/group)were engaged in dairy business and were earning a profit of Rs 1360/day. Dairy farming is highly occupied (65–70%) by rural women in district Bulandshahar. Almost all the dairy related chores are looked after by women in rural areas. During study it was found that most of the women (68.79%) from Jahangirabad block are involved in dairy related practices. 58.34% of SHGs of Block 4 (Jahangirbad) is facing some or the other constraints like social, financial and marketing followed by Block 1 (Anoopshahar), block 2 (Danpur) and block 3 (Dibai) with 56.64%, 55.88% and 51.56%, respectively. Well crafted awareness campaigns were found to be advantageous. Women were generally not much involved in banking procedures therefore they should be encouraged by males to look into banking procedures of SHGs. Processing of milk could also be taken along with mere sale of milk in SHGs to improve the earning. It was very much visible from the study that dairying could be appropriately accepted as a business for self reliability and to raise the socio-economic status of the rural women.