On every Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) measurement, rural India is always left far behind urban India. Within this population, the Indian women are the ones who are the most impacted. Therefore, if you want to transform India at scale, you will have to uplift rural India. If you look at our aspirational districts, less than 2% of funding goes to them.

Water and Agriculture: Scaling select proven models in water and agriculture to transform farmer lives.

With most of India’s bottom quartile overlapping with families of marginal farmers, uplifting them becomes central to the vision for a Viksit Bharat

Water has always been a scarce resource in India, given we have 18% of the world’s population, but only 4% of its water resources (footnote: World Bank). Climate change is increasingly causing droughts, causing acute Agri distress in terms of life and expensive relief measures, including farm loan waivers at the extreme. The extreme drought in Maharashtra in 2013 was a turning point for us and we asked if there was a sustainable solution to this difficult problem? With our partner, Caring Friends, our focus turned to the Rejuvenation of Waterbodies, which we have since templatised and scaled into a movement across 5 states impacting over a million villagers in partnership with Governments, NGOs and others

Our farming practices since the green revolution have left our soil barren, while our productivity and income per acre at the median, across crops, is abysmal. At the same time, the country is spending over Rs. 175,000 crores in fertilizer subsidy and there is concern on the impact of overuse of chemicals in produce on the human body. Regenerative Agriculture, when and where done right provides a sustainable alternative that addresses many of these issues. However, transition to such farming needs to be done scientifically and/or in an evidence based manner, and then scaled with proper support mechanisms. Our journey in this area aims to address some of these gaps.