India ranks among the top producers of egg and poultry with an annual output of 41 billion eggs and around 1260 million broilers and has an immense potential to grow, given the low per capita consumption. Over two million people are directly and indirectly employed in poultry sector, which ranges from commercial poultry to rural backyard and smallholder poultry.

The commercial poultry are a highly viable, commercially intensive, well integrated and having complete control over the distribution chain. The target consumer base is the urban and periurban market with increasing trend for export and through value addition in term of frozen meat and egg powder.

The backyard poultry is a highly unorganized sector, constitutes 30% in terms of production and 70% in terms of employment, largely consisting of small, marginal and landless farmers, which includes sizable tribal and backward community population. It fulfills a wide range of functions - e.g. the provision of meat and eggs, food for special festivals, chicken for traditional ceremonies, pest control and petty cash, utilizing minimum inputs, minimum human attention, and causing less environmental pollution along with ensuring nutritional security and subsidiary income to buy more food, send children to school and augment assets to ensure financial security.

The existing government programme, apart from being biased towards large animals, has a wide gap between training small farmer and community and assistance for starting the poultry. The NGOs can intervene and bridge the gap, identifying the right mix of technology, government programme and project model to provide a livelihood opportunity to the community. The proposed poultry model is designed with the intent to maximize livelihood opportunities leading to poverty alleviation, ensuring a minimum of Rs 8,000 per family in a year and not, primarily, to stimulate an increase in production of eggs and poultry meat.

An egg incubator developed by Mr. Kallada Jeffery, which is low capacity, low cost having a high hatchability ratio can be an important component for mini hatcheries at village level, ensuring a minimum earning of Rs 19,000 per annum. 32 Incubators shall be required in a project area for the first year. This number is bound to increase with the increase in the project area and replacement of the existing model. Further given the low cost USP of the innovation, centralized production would involve high transport cost thereby diluting the advantage. Also there is a need to develop local capability to repair and maintain incubator with the local community, licensing technology for small geographical area would be the best option. The licensing model would be based on one time payment basis, as monitoring production and revenue shall be difficult. The licensee may be a NGO or its initiative.

The tribal and backward community populations have been traditionally rearing chicks, which is not economically viable given the high mortality and low productivity of the reared chicks. The identified chicks for the project i.e. White Leg Horn (C-Line), Rhode Island Red and Karaknath, are known for their resistance to common disease, survival in adverse environment, nutritional value, aroma and taste of egg. The proposed model can be implement in the tribal and backward areas of the country, except south, where commercial poultry is well developed and the realizable cost of the poultry product does not make it feasible.

The Project may be dovetailed in the some of the existing schemes and programme of the Central and State government for financial assistance along with international funding organisations such as Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), Network for small poultry Development, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and Food and agriculture Organisation (FAO). There are not many organizations that take up backyard poultry as livelihood projects, some of the leading ones who have taken it up as an innovative intervention approach are PRADAN, BAIF and DHAN Foundation. Poultry project may also be taken up as an entry point work under the watershed programme and District poverty initiative programme (DPIP).

The execution of the project would require advocating recognition of backyard as a livelihood option for the family falling in the BPL category, promoting the concept of village level hatcheries, linking different government scheme for training and credit. This may be done through advocating recognition and developing it in the vision documents and integrating different schemes for promotion and propagation of backyard poultry.