Indian Grameen Services

Augment access of poor to sustainable livelihoods

Overview

By 1982 the founding members of Indian Grameen Services (IGS) Shri Vijay Mahajan Shri Deep Joshi and Dr. Sankar Datta were already considering the importance of professionals engaging in development action. The initial work done with ASSEFA a Gandhian NGO helped the trio in establishing Pradan (www.pradan.net) in 1983. In 1987 IGS was registered as a Section 25 (now Section 8) not for profit company under the aegis of Pradan to undertake research and development in livelihood promotion.In pursuit of its vision to augment access of poor to sustainable livelihoods IGS sees itself as a laboratory for incubating innovations and defines its mission as Incubating Innovations for Pro Poor Sustainable Livelihoods Incubating initiatives by generating / adapting new ideas and mobilizing appropriate financial human and technical resources for sustaining these ideas to prove their viability replicability scalability and sustainability and having proven models into separate entities.Innovations Creating and/or improvising models and approaches which are novel and address contemporary livelihood challenges.Pro poor Livelihood promotion initiatives which by design (rather than default) have the potential to impact livelihoods for a large number of poor households and which can be managed and owned by the poor.