Livelihoods and Food Security India
Home / What We Do

VIEW ALL PROGRAMMES

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

Poverty in India is concentrated in disadvantaged areas and among marginalised groups. Pragya works with some of these poorest communities living in challenging environments on the margins of society. Small and marginal farming households are often beset by endemic poverty, chronic food insecurity and the severe anxiety that comes with subsistence agriculture in volatile climates where climate change is spurring ever-more unpredictable threats to lives and livelihoods. They face multiple layers of socioeconomic disadvantage, with low educational attainment and lack of skills coupled with a scarcity of job opportunities resulting in job insecurity and high unemployment. Meagre land holdings are subject to further division by generation, with some labourers entirely landless, and what land is available is often characterised by poor quality soils on challenging terrain with inadequate irrigation – leaving farmers unable to produce enough to feed their families. Even where smallholding communities are able to generate sufficient agricultural produce, they... Read More

Poverty in India is concentrated in disadvantaged areas and among marginalised groups. Pragya works with some of these poorest communities living in challenging environments on the margins of society. Small and marginal farming households are often beset by endemic poverty, chronic food insecurity and the severe anxiety that comes with subsistence agriculture in volatile climates where climate change is spurring ever-more unpredictable threats to lives and livelihoods. They face multiple layers of socioeconomic disadvantage, with low educational attainment and lack of skills coupled with a scarcity of job opportunities resulting in job insecurity and high unemployment. Meagre land holdings are subject to further division by generation, with some labourers entirely landless, and what land is available is often characterised by poor quality soils on challenging terrain with inadequate irrigation – leaving farmers unable to produce enough to feed their families. Even where smallholding communities are able to generate sufficient agricultural produce, they commonly lack access to the marketplace and have little capacity to generate market linkages. Young members of landless or impoverished families flock to the urban areas in search of economic opportunities but lack the skills necessary to take advantage of those available; they have to resort to daily wage labour with sub-human working conditions and become a part of the vast urban underbelly.

Our Livelihoods and Food Security programme is helping lift deprived communities out of poverty, providing vital inputs and training across both traditional and niche-sector occupations. Our agricultural projects are helping smallholding farming communities diversify farm produce for higher earnings and improved community nutrition, take up cultivation of cash crops in which communities have a competitive advantage, such as medicinal plants, adapt to climate change and improve farm yields. We are also promoting alternative niche-sector occupations, such as harnessing cultural and ecological heritage for the development of small scale traditional handloom and handicrafts enterprises, as well as eco-friendly hospitality and tourism initiatives. To address the issue of youth unemployment, we support young people to achieve their goals through building their vocational skills and encouraging young entrepreneurship.

Show Less

Success story

Farmers lead on climate adaptation

“The trainings informed me how to carry out participatory, farm-level research on adaptation to climate change. We learnt about arid-area crops, dro

Read Story

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

VOCATIONAL SKILL BUILDING

One of the greatest challenges facing the youth in disadvantaged communities around the world is unemployment, and the economic uncertainty and anxiety that emerges from it. Young people living in rural areas are unable to find productive work due to a deficit of appropriate knowledge, skills, and opportunities. The declining prospects of traditional occupations signal to rural youth potentially worse impoverishment than their forebears. This propels youth outmigration from rural communities to urban centres in a bid to find opportunities for new kinds of work and better prospects for the future; majority however get absorbed into intermittent, low grade, unskilled, poorly-paid wage-labour. At the same time, this has devastating impacts on the communities they leave behind, with the breakdown of established social systems essential to the proper functioning of the community, and an aging population unable to support itself. India has the world’ largest youth population with half a billion people in the 15-35 age-group by 2021, but the job market absorbs only a small part of them.

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

VOCATIONAL SKILL BUILDING

Pragya believes that young people should have every opportunity to thrive in the working world, to undertake engaging work that is conducive to both individual character building and a flourishing of communities as a whole.

Pragya delivers certificate vocational coursesin occupations such as retail, hospitality and tourism, construction, electronics and IT, based on local labour market demands. These courses are conducted in collaboration with universities and other institutes, or through Resource Centres established by Pragya- see Access to Education for the Last Mile. They help develop sector specific-skills in the youth and include exposure visits and/or practical training. Many of the skills learned in these short-term courses are transferable, and hence participants are equipped not just to enter these specific occupations but to broaden their horizons more generally. Our IT courses, in particular, are equipping adolescents and young adults with computer skills applicable to a range of occupations.

Complementing these courses, our Resource Centres act as hubs of careers informationand employment-related facilities. Trained careers advisors are on hand at the centres to provide guidance and help the unemployed explore appropriate careers avenues, along with the necessary steps towards pursuing a chosen occupation, including application support; advisors also provide support through dedicated helplines. We also believe that youth from marginalised communities have all the necessary passion, drive and creativity to become the next leaders and wealth-creators, and fuelling this spark Pragya works to promote youth entrepreneurship, facilitating the know-how for youth to start up small-scale enterprises, bringing ideas to life and ultimately generating further employment.

We also create linkages for networking with employers and institutes, providing crucial sector engagement and a helping hand in launching new careers for the trained youth. Placement supportare provided to individual trained youth and career fairs conducted.

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

VOCATIONAL SKILL BUILDING

GEOGRAPHY / LOCATION

Pragya’s vocational skill-building work is focussed on Below Poverty Line communities in especially poor parts of India such as rural Rajasthan and Bihar, remote parts of the Indian Himalayas, as well as in urban slums in the national capital region of Delhi, where youth unemployment is very high.

 

 

  • ISSUES
  • What we do
  • Impacts

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

AGRICULTURE DEVELOPMENT AND CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE

India’s smallholder farming households constitute the bulk of the rural poor. They depend on small farming and wage labour for their sustenance and livelihoods,and suffer chronic poverty and food insecurity. Several regions are characterised by poor quality soils and lack of infrastructure. Climate change is additionally posing a severe risk to small farmers who have little or no access to technical support.Lack of capacity for and inability to invest in improved agricultural methods constrains the small farmers from cultivating cash crops, and along with lack of access to post-harvest facilities and resultant high degree of wastage, poor access to markets and trading through exploitative middlemen, results in low farm efficiencies and incomes. In addition, increasing weather variability due to climate change has meant recurrent droughts or floods, frequent crop failures, and rapidly reducing farm productivity levels, with maximum decrease in marginal farms.The fallout is increasing impoverishment and debt burden of the farmers.

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

AGRICULTURE DEVELOPMENT AND CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE

Pragya takes a multifaceted, comprehensive approach to tackling poverty and food insecurity among small farmers, employing a combination of agricultural extension and market support services, along with participatory crop research for agricultural adaptation to climate change, whilst harnessing the opportunities afforded by appropriate technologies and digital platforms.

Pragya establishes Local Agri-Clinicsin rural provinces, knowledge hubs accessible to farmers to enable them to improve their agricultural practices. These centres conduct periodic farmermeetings on farming issues and challenges and trainings on improved agronomy and agricultural technologies. Local youth with interest in agricultural development are trained in agricultural science and technologies and supported to set up as Agri-Advisorsto provide advice on crops and yield enhancement, soil improvement, and newer cultivation methods and technologies. Soil testing services and local weather forecasts are also provided. 

Pragya has developed a range of agricultural knowledge resourcesto support small farmers and Agri-Advisors: a pioneering and award-winning (ICT for Mountain Development Award- see Awards) ICT-based Crop-advisory; training AVs on newer agronomies/agro-technologies; a comprehensive Improved Agronomy Manual. We also empower experienced smallholding farmers to undertake participatory crop research for Climate Smart Agriculture, and share the knowledge gained amongst the community.

Pragya has a strong emphasis on improved and resource-efficient agriculture. Uptake of suitable cash crops and new agricultural technologies by the farmers is actively supported, in particular: cultivation of high-value medicinal plants– see Pragya’s Program Cultivation of Medicinal Plants; efficient irrigation technologies such as drip and sprinkler irrigation, solar pumps, improved channels and tanks; polyhouse cultivation of exotic vegetables; wasteland reclamation through cultivation of fodder and woody species; and a range of watershed management measures.

Pragya delivers special support measures for women farmers, with female Agri-Advisors providing extension services to them and forming Self Help Groups of women farmers. In addition, a research is also underway to identify agricultural tools that would reduce the physical drudgery of women- see Research. In order to address the food insecurity of small farmer families, Pragya also supports women to set up kitchen gardens of nutritive crops that would improve nutritional levels of their families- see Pragya’s Program onEradicating Malnutrition.

Additionally, we promote small farmer enterprise through the establishment of farmer cooperativesand link them up to larger buyers, suppliers of agricultural inputs and technologies, agencies for crop insurance. We support local value addition through our Agri-Business Centresthat provide post-harvest processing and storage solutions, and farmers also have access to our agricultural enterprise database, which contains a wealth of business-support information. 

Regionally, Pragya establishes location-tailored agricultural advisory networksbringing together local, regional and national agricultural specialists, universities and departments, to share knowledge, facilitate ideas and extend inputs to smallholding farmers for improved agricultural outcomes.

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

AGRICULTURE DEVELOPMENT AND CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE

GEOGRAPHY / LOCATION

Our model for agriculture development and climate smart agriculture, along with enhancing food security for communities, has been/is operational in the states of Assam, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jammu & Kashmir and Uttarakhand, and is adapted by location.

 

  • ISSUES
  • What we do
  • Impacts

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

CULTIVATION OF MEDICINAL PLANTS

India is home to rare and precious medicinal and aromatic plants, used locally in traditional medicine, but on a much greater scale in the supplementary medicine and cosmetics markets, which present a significant and growing demand for the plants and pressure for their extraction. These plants can have values many times that of the staple crops grown by the smallholding farming communities that typically populate the regions in which medicinal plants grow. These communities forage the plants as a means of additional income, but without direct access to larger buyers, much of the profit goes to middlemen. With appropriate support however, the sustainable management of this herbal wealth represents a lucrative economic opportunity for poor communities struggling to earn a living. 

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

CULTIVATION OF MEDICINAL PLANTS

Pragya is helping rural communities in India to cultivate medicinal and aromatic plants as a cash crop and a way out of poverty, an initiative that had won us the Whitley Gold Award- see Awards.

Since most of these species are undomesticated, this initiative had to be preceded by rigorous research by Pragya’s agriculture specialists into medicinal and aromatic plants with high market demand, their propagation and growth patterns, in order to develop their cultivation protocols, and dealing with issues like seed dormancy and uniformity of the medicinal value/content. Pragya has developed an ICT-based Crop Advisory for farmers which also includes several medicinal and aromatic crops, and the specific cultivation protocols.

We train smallholders in the cultivation protocols for various native high-value medicinal and aromatic plants, and provide start-up support so communities can establish their own medicinal plant plantationsand begin putting knowledge into practice. The medicinal plant farmers are also intensively trained on organic farming, an important part of the established Good Agricultural Practices for medicinal and aromatic plants. To aid the grassroots inter-community dispersion and sustainability of the initiative, Pragya supports the setting up of medicinal plant nurseriesto ensure availability of high-quality seeds and saplings to local cultivators, and we train traditional medicine practitioners and experienced local farmers to manage these nurseries. This also has a strong link to Pragya’s work on conservation of medicinal plants and traditional knowledge systems- see Pragya’s Programs on Conserving Medicinal Plantsand on Culture Preservation.

An essential aspect of this work is securing access to market and the formation of responsible trade networks. Pragya supports formation of growers’ cooperatives, enabling smallholders to pool their medicinal plant harvest together to sell in larger quantities to big buyers, cutting out unscrupulous middlemen and securing a fair deal. We facilitate buyer-seller meetings and support cooperatives to negotiate a good price, whilst Pragya’s Agri-Business Centres enable post-harvest processing, storage and logistics solutions.

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

CULTIVATION OF MEDICINAL PLANTS

GEOGRAPHY / LOCATION

The programme on Conserving Medicinal Plants has been/ is being implemented across north India, including in the Himalayan belt and its foothills comprising the states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Uttarakhand, as well as in the north Indian plains region comprising the states of Rajasthan and Bihar.

 

  • ISSUES
  • What we do
  • Impacts

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

NICHE SECTOR LIVELIHOODS

India’s rural communities are facing unprecedented levels of threat to traditional agriculture-based livelihoods, with climate change driving declining soil quality and disrupting established water supplies; this is especially problematic in mountainous regions, where cultivatable land is typically characterised by small dispersed plots subject to generational land division and constraints in irrigation. Geographic remoteness and rough terrain can mean little access to regional markets, resulting in unethical supply chains that exploit poor smallholders. Additionally, rural and mountain communities may have poor access to regional labour markets, and with smallholding agriculture offering little job creation, youth outmigration to urban centres in search of work is escalating sharply, much to the detriment of rural economies. 

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

NICHE SECTOR LIVELIHOODS

With a focus on below-poverty-line communities with poor access to local labour markets, Pragya seeks to improve the economic prospects in less-developed areas with livelihoods that leverage the inhabitants’ comparative advantages.

These projects typically begin with research to establish niche-sector vocationsbased on latent economic opportunity, and blending the traditional and native resources with inputs to make the resulting products/services suitable for modern markets. Pragya also devotes significant efforts on product/service designand on market research and development, in collaboration with reputed institutions. High-impact vocational trainingis followed by initial material inputsto early adopters from the community, with a phased reduction in support, and the establishment of fair market linkages. By harnessing the unexplored potential of local resources and cultures, and leveraging the burgeoning tourism in these areas, in tandem with the establishment of ethical trade networks that ensure producers receive a fair price for their produce, our approach drives local job-creation and livelihoods diversification.

Our initiatives in this area are wide-ranging and span speciality agriculture, as well as tourism-based enterprises such as ecotourism and performing arts and crafts. Our Handicrafts projects are aimed at the local tourist market and build capacity for traditional occupations such as the weaving of baskets, as well as loom-based production of garments, accessories and rugs, that combine heritage design with modern trends. Our Performing Arts projects help valorise local music and dance forms as an allied enterprise for the ecotourism industry- see Pragya’s Program on Culture Preservation. Our specialty agriculture projects involve commercial cultivation of native spices and aromatics, and fruits and nuts- see Pragya’s Program on Cultivation of Medicinal Plants. Pragya is always on the lookout for appropriate new livelihoods opportunities and innovations for poverty relief that preserve the uniqueness and heritage of different cultures whilst sustainably utilising locally available resources.

LIVELIHOODS AND FOOD SECURITY

NICHE SECTOR LIVELIHOODS

GEOGRAPHY / LOCATION

The programme on Niche Sector Livelihoods has been / is being implemented in the Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Uttarakhand states in India.

 

  • ISSUES
  • What we do
  • Impacts