ABSTRACT
The National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) is a flagship programme of the Government of India (GoI) that aims to address poverty by providing sustainable livelihoods to the impoverished. NRLM demonstrates the importance of decentralised approaches, like community ownership, and has fostered social capital accumulation and capacity building at scale across states by facilitating the formation of self-help groups, village organisations, and other grassroots collectives. This study explores the implementation journey of NRLM, as a major community-driven development programme that has shown encouraging outcomes across evaluation studies. Employing a qualitative methodology, the paper draws from both the author's extensive experience working with NRLM and relevant academic literature to analyse the key governance mechanisms, community processes, and institutional practices established by the Mission.
