The initiative is located in Central India, encompassing the Vidarbha District and the adjoining districts of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Dietary-based anemia is a widespread problem, especially amongst young women. The area is facing an acute agrarian crisis. One of its causes is climate change and the increasingly unpredictable monsoon resultant crop failure. Farmers increasingly extract groundwater through bore wells to overcome this misfortune. To dig bore wells, farmers borrow at prohibitively high rates of interest from private money lenders, and the groundwater table is dropping rapidly.

The initiative is supported by Dharamitra with the mission of Dharamitra to foster the sustainable development of rural populations through the judicious management of natural resources and the promotion of ecological agriculture in order to preserve the environment and promote sustainable development.

Sustainable agriculture and income generation practices include alternative cultivation practices, organic recycling, renewable energy, soil and water conservation, the greening of land through tree cover, and the introduction of bio-diversified systems in farming. The farmers in each village have organized into "Farmers' Study Groups", which are facilitated by a trained motivator, who is a young practicing farmer from the same village.

Dharamitra has supported the agroecological transition by providing farmers with access to viable nonchemical agricultural practices through training, demonstration, and exposure visits. Follow-up and monitoring have helped address any problems and data on crop yields as well as cost-benefit of crop production has been collected and analyzed. The randomly collected soil samples from farms of the beneficiaries are also analyzed for physical, chemical, and microbial parameters.

Home kitchen gardens produce 15 to 20 types of vegetables in the courtyards of homes of more than 2,500 families in 35 villages. Benefits accruing to these families include abundant availability of organically grown fresh vegetables for self-consumption, more consumption of vegetables by women, saving of cost usually incurred for the purchase of vegetables, and improvement in general health.

This fact sheet is produced as part of the Avaclim project, which aims to create the necessary conditions for the deployment of agroecology in dryland areas. The international solidarity association CARI coordinates the Avaclim project while the Gosavi Bahuudeshiya Sanstha (GBS) is in charge of its implementation in India.