The District Poverty Initiatives Project (DPIP) is an ambitious project of the Government of Madhya Pradesh for the alleviation of poverty in the State. The DPIP-I was implemented in 2817 villages across 53 development blocks spread over 14 districts of the state viz – Chhatarpur, Damoh, Sagar, Panna, Raisen, Vidisha, Guna, Tikamgarh, Sidhi, Narsinghpur, Rajgarh, Rewa, Shajapur and Shivpuri. The target population in the villages was motivated to form groups known as Common Interest Group or shortly (CIG). The project organized families into over 56,000 Common Interest Groups (CIGs), providing them with financial and technical assistance so as to improve livelihood including their organizational capacity and maximizing the utility of their productive assets. The objective of the Baseline was to provide information with respect to poverty and empowerment in villages covered by DPIP. BLS generated reliable quantitative and qualitative poverty - related data, which would serve as a benchmark. Also it helped to optimize the effectiveness and relevance of planning, tracking, and evaluating various projects interventions. The BLS covered 308 villages through a stratified two stage sampling design. The various instruments used were enumeration, household schedule and other participatory approaches.
The survey was done in Shajapur, Rajgarh, Vidisha, Guna, Shivpuri, Narsinghpur, Raisen, Damoh, Sagar, Rewa, Tikamgarh, Chattarpur, Panna and Sidhi in Madhya Pradesh, India.