28 year old Neetu Rani from Mehrauli in Delhi always remained deeply disturbed due to her family’s poverty. Her husband is an unskilled worker with limited income which is not good enough to meet their family requirements.
The mother of three always wanted to join a beautician course and do something of her own, but was never able to do so because of their meagre income and virtually no savings. So when the community mobilizer of ACM GIDF visited their home and offered her a Beauty Culture course absolutely free of cost, at first she couldn’t believe her ears, but decided to visit our centre nonetheless.
Soon afterwards she enrolled into the course being conducted by GRC SK. In the centre, besides attending regular classes, she also gets to know about various Delhi Government welfare schemes meant for girls. She also shares her personal problems with the legal aid counsellor. ACM GIDF staff also helped her open her first Post Office Savings account, where she has started saving whatever money she can on a monthly basis.
Neetu Rani says the GRC SK centre has helped changed her outlook towards life. For us, the major change we have observed in her is a new-found confidence. She believes, and rightly so, that the day is not far away when she can help augment the family income with her own earnings.
For Tahira, it was almost like a dream come true when ACM GIDF earmarked her neighbourhood, Gulshan Bagh, for the theme based cluster intervention.
Self-reliant by nature, the young girl attended the awareness camp, and was immediately hooked to the idea of self-help-groups. She volunteered and soon became one of the most active members of the newly formed SHG, and before she knew it, the other members sensed her enthusiasm and elected her to the post of the president.
Coming from a family of Paper Machie artisans, Tahira had the skill and the aptitude to take up the craft as a source of sustenance. What she lacked, however, was the initial funds to buy the raw materials.
Her family didn’t have the means to support her aspirations. She lost her father while she was just eight years old, and her brother settled down separately after marriage. Tahira ended up in a kuccha house with her two sisters and her mother. But yes, from her father, and then from her brother, she picked up the basic skills of paper machie craftwork.
GIDF encouraged her to share her predicament with other SHG members who told her to take a loan from the corpus fund. With this loan of 10,000 rupees, Tahira bought the necessary raw material and started her own paper machie making unit.
Today, Tahira is confident of her future, and she is thankful to ACM GIDF for changing the course of her life. To say it in her words, "The GIDF initiative has brought an element of empowerment in us. Now, we can also dream of setting up our units and explore our potential."
Isolation from the mainstream of development makes people feel neglected and sidelined. Gainful employment integrates them to the system, goes a long way to make them belong to governance and keeps disruptive thoughts at bay. With this in mind, ACM GIDF promotes holistic, sustainable livelihood models across the nation targeting the marginalised sections of Indian population, and involving all major stakeholders 
