Nirdhan, registered as a Section 8 Company, was incorporated in 2011. It has a board of five directors all with excellent and varied backgrounds: entrepreneurial, legal, IT and commercial (see section on Board of Directors). Nirdhan works across 5 districts of West Bengal and contracts three part-time consultants and employs a full-time team comprising of five field supervisors who drives the operations locally, builds up the team and monitors the progress of the operations daily. The team plans future operations, researches new enterprises and reports to the board members on a regular basis to ensure money is being used effectively. Nirdhan has 5 Board of Directors, 2 Finance officers, 1 Head of Livelihood Programmes, 1 agricultural certified expert and also employs 5 field supervisors and 30 Livelihood Service Providers (LSPs). The LSPs market the programme, assess and register potential home-farmers, complete our Social Impact Assessments and reassessments through a scoring system of the PPI index so that we can measure our outcomes, provide the training, deliver the toolkits (10 one-day-old chicks/ducks, initial feed, vaccinations and medications) and collect payments. All the LSPs come from the villages where we are working and so understand the needs of the home-farmers and are passionate about creating positive social change and relieving their own people from suffering.

In year 2022, we have opened a new location at Chhatna in Bankura district and started our Poultry Development Services with the poorest of the poor households (especially women) in this location. We have also closed down our first location Kanchrapara (Familia) after eleven years of working there and succeeded in uplifting more than 7,800 households from the clutches of poverty and who are now running their own permanent enterprises completely independently.

Nirdhan was founded in 2011 and its mission is to create livelihoods, boost income and inspire permanent change. Our target group has always been the very poor in Bengal which is India’s fourth most populous state. It is in fact one of the poorest states in India and living standards for the majority are declining.