Restoring forests for restoring community health

Dear Supporter,

As more and more people got vaccinated world over and in India, there was higher level of confidence among the governments to lift restrictions on movement people and other activities on grounds of COVID-19.

We made full use of this opportunity and geared up ourselves for undertaking the work of land restoration in village Mangiwali - our site of intervention. As mentioned in our previous report, our team had identified 25 acres of land in this village through GIS analysis of land use land cover ( LULC). We had now more difficult task on hand- to convince the local community members to get engaged in restoration of their lands. In principle for them, it meant that they will have to lock their land for next 10 years in the hope that they will get sufficient economic benefits as they would otherwise expect from plantation of commercial agroforestry crops- cashew.

Thus we needed to be very careful while selecting the land parcels and tree species for plantation. We chose those land parcels that were close to the forest areas and slightly difficult to access for plantation of commercial crops. Moreover we proposed that tree species locally known as Karanj ( Pongamia pinnata) - a multi purpose tree species will be planted. Our team made a detailed presentation on economical and ecological benefits of Karanj tree to the key stakeholders from the village and distributed copies of the outreach material prepared in local language for this purpose among the beneficiaries.

Pongamia pinnata ( Karanj)- is fast growing tree species commonly found across India and some countries in south east asia and pacific. It is an excellent candidate for land restoration as it fixes nitrogen from the air in the soil and thus improves the quality of the soil. On the other hand, it has tap root and thus it requires minimum watering during the periods of stress. As regards its economic benefits, its seed produce non-edible oil in good quantity ( 20-33%). Moreover this oil finds application in medicine, cosmetic and bio-fuel industry. With growing awareness about climate change, more and more governments, companies, people across the world are searching for sustainable materials for greening their carbon footfprint. As a result, demand for seed oil of Pongamia pinnata will only be growing over the next decade. 

We made a commitment that we will buy the entire production of seeds from the trees at economically attractive price and ensure that local communities get livelihood opportunities during plantation and maintainence of the saplings over the next 10 years. Moreover if the seed production indeed goes up significantly, we will set up oil production unit in the village. 

This convinced the communities very much and thus 3 farmers came forward and offered 10 acres of their degraded land located near forest areas for restoration. We had on purpose selected those land parcels as we had decided to create a community buffer. 

All in all everything fell in place and we could plant 2000 saplings of Pongamia pinnata trees on these land parcels.

Some 10 community members from village Mangiwali participated in the plantation and received daily wages for a period of one week. 

We are aware that this is first small step in restoring degradaed land and creating economic benefits from this long process but we gained significant confidence by winning trust of local communities in this long journey.

In the next year, we will expand the plantation on 25 acreas and complete the target of planting 10,000 saplings. 

We thank you for your continued interest in and support to this initiative.

Best regards

Suchitra Naidu