The livelihoods of landless and altra-poor Tharu community in Beluwa VDC of Bardiya District primarily depend on the Babio, a kind of grass collected from the forest. Babio rope making is a traditional occupation of this Tharu community. They collect Babio from the Bardiya National Park on license from the park authority and some times also from Churiya Jangle. As their traditional occupation, the grown up members of every household in this community are self-employed in making Babio rope. The income they earn from selling the Babio rope is only the source of their livelihoods. However, since they used to make rope manually, their production was too low and so is the income resulting hard time for them to have two ends meal for the family. The potentiality for increasing production and productivity with the use of simple and appropriate technology was there which they were unaware of it.

As Bardiya is one of the districts under Micro-Enterprise Development Programme (MEDEP) funded by UNDP, the programme's activities are directed to address the case of this Tharu community. Since MEDEP's underlying objective is to diversify the livelihoods and increase the income of low-income families through micro-enterprise development and promotion, it explored the possibilities for enhancing the efficiency of their traditional Babio rope making occupation and developing it as a micro-enterprise for this altra poor tharu community.

MEDEP provided them entrepreneurship training and facilitated to form a group. The training aspired them to form a group and develop Babio rope making as a community enterprise for their sustainable livelihoods. Now they have already formed a group of six members (three men, three women) namely "Babio Micro-Enterprise Group" led by Lautan Tharu and working together to improve the production efficiency of the enterprise. They started looking for appropriate technology that increases production and productivity of Babio rope making enterprise.

As part of supporting low income rural community to developing and promoting micro-enterprises, MEDEP provided them a simple improvised rope making technology (Paddle operated machine) so as to improve their efficiency and output. Consequently, the impact of this appropriate technology has been fairly significant to that their production efficiency has been increased with many folds.

According to Dinesh Tharu, one of the members of the Babio M.E. Group, one person could hardly produce 1.5 kg of rope before the introduction of technology but now a person can produce up to 14 kg of Babio rope a day. The use of machine can produce Babio rope as much as the amount that 6 persons could produce in a day manually. Thus, according to him the machine is being operated up to 8 hours a day by the members of the group tern by tern and produced up to 14 kg of Babio rope daily. On an average, the group produces 400 kg of Babio rope a month and sales in local Hatbazaar at whole price (Rs 20 per kg) and in the villages for household use at retail price (Rs. 25 per kg ) and earn an income of Rs. 8000 to 10,000 a month. They share the monthly income earn from selling the rope among the group members on the basis of work and amount of raw materials supplied by each member.

The members of this Babio M.E. Group seem to be happy in that they have been able to make more from their traditional Babio rope making occupation. Since this is the only primary source of their livelihoods, they want to improve and expand further and develop as a sustainable enterprise.

This case study derives that making rural poor an entrepreneur should not be a single factor approach i.e. providing skills, finance or technology alone but it should be the effective combination of all essential factors required for an enterprise. Past experience is that single factor approach of enterprise development did not work well. Therefore the, the individuals or the institutions working for enterprise development, particularly the micro-enterprise, should take a wholestic approach of entrepreneurship development.