Programmes
Natural Resource Management & Livelihoods
There is no industry here to speak of. Almost everyone farms, holdings are small, and when a season disappoints, people leave to find work elsewhere. Since 1993 the trust has worked on both halves of that problem — making the farm itself less fragile, and building trades and institutions that pay without anyone having to migrate.
Thematic area
Natural Resources & Sustainable Livelihoods
કુદરતી સંસાધનો અને ટકાઉ આજીવિકા
The strategic goal it works towards
To promote sustainable and innovative agricultural practices, improve soil, water and air quality, conserve biodiversity, and strengthen ecosystem services that support resilient livelihoods.
Read the whole frameworkThis programme covers
- REEL Cotton — sustainable practice, traceability and decent work
- Better Cotton Initiative programme
- Jafrabad Agricultural Producer Company Ltd., a farmer-owned company
- Self-help group promotion and credit linkage
- Vocational training for women — aari-bharat embroidery and fancy work
- Biodiversity Management Committees and the People's Biodiversity Register
The problem
A district with no major enterprise gives a household one thing to sell and one season in which to sell it. Holdings are small, inputs are bought with borrowed cash, and the price at the far end is set by somebody else. When the monsoon is short or the price is low, the adjustment is migration: the family goes where the work is, which takes the children out of school and the household out of every scheme and service attached to its own village. None of this is fixed by one good harvest. It needs the cost side of the farm to come down, and it needs work that exists in the village during the months the farm needs nobody.
What we do
Make the farm worth staying on
Training in sustainable practice, farm by farm and season by season — soil and nutrient management, pest management, water, and the waste and ecosystem side that usually gets ignored because nobody is paid for it.
Institutions the farmers own
One smallholder has no bargaining power; several hundred organised into a producer company have some. The trust promoted and facilitated Jafrabad Agricultural Producer Company Ltd., and has organised self-help groups and linked them to credit.
Skills that pay without leaving
Vocational training aimed mainly at women — aari-bharat embroidery, fancy work, a beauty parlour course — run through a training centre, so that an earning option exists in the village and in the off-season.
Look after the commons
Water and biodiversity are held in common, which is why they are the first things to be spent. The trust has provided technical support to Biodiversity Management Committees and to the People's Biodiversity Register, and worked on village drinking water.
The founders recognised early that this area needed alternative livelihoods: there are no industries and no major enterprises, most people farm, and people in rural areas migrate when the farm cannot carry them. Vocational training for women began about seven years after the trust was founded, and the natural resource management work — self-employment groups, skill development, and later sustainable agriculture — grew out of the same reasoning.
REEL Cotton
REEL stands for Responsible Environment Enhanced Livelihoods. CottonConnect and FLOCERT developed the code of conduct behind it: an internationally recognised private code of sustainable agricultural practice, verified by FLOCERT, with added elements covering traceability and decent work. Brands and retailers treat it as a model sustainability programme code. Verification is what separates it from advice — a farmer in the programme is confirmed to be using the practices, not merely to have heard about them.
The code is built around eight principles:
- Integrated management system
- Plant and field management
- Soil and integrated nutrient management
- Pest management
- Water management
- Ecosystem protection
- Waste management
- Institution building
Hariraj delivers the training and promotes the practices to 300 smallholder cotton farmers in the Vadodara region. On a small farm the principle that changes the most money is pest management: identifying what is actually eating the crop before buying another spray.
The trust has also run the Better Cotton Initiative programme, on the same logic and with the same field method — learning groups through the season rather than a training day and a certificate.
Institutions farmers own
Hariraj promoted and facilitated Jafrabad Agricultural Producer Company Ltd., a farmer producer organisation on the Jafrabad coast, described on the trust’s earlier website as having been at work since 2016. It handles the things an individual smallholder cannot: buying inputs together, and finding a buyer who will deal with a company rather than with one farmer at a time.
Alongside it, the trust has organised self-help groups and worked on their credit linkages, which is the difference between a group that meets and a group that can lend.
Trades that do not require leaving
The livelihood work for women started with vocational training and has stayed close to it:
- Aari-bharat training — the aari embroidery of this region, which has a market
- Embroidery and fancy work through a vocational training centre
- A beauty parlour course, one of the few trades in a small town that needs no premises to begin with
Commons, water and heritage
Several earlier activities sit under this programme, and the archive of the old website records them by name without further description. They are listed here as they were, rather than embellished:
- Technical support group for the Biodiversity Management Committee and the People’s Biodiversity Register
- Nirmal Jal Sukhari
- Monument renovation — the trust has done restoration work at historical sites in the district
- Resource organisation under VVY
Anyone wanting detail on these should ask the office; we would rather point at a gap in our own records than write around it.
Where we work
Farm and livelihood work runs across the trust's intervention villages in Amreli district, with the Jafrabad producer company on the coast. The REEL Cotton training group is in the Vadodara region, and the trust's wider work now reaches Rajkot and Narmada as well.
- 40+
- Intervention villages
- 300
- REEL Cotton farmers
- 1
- Producer company promoted
By the numbers
- 300
- Smallholder cotton farmers in REEL Cotton trainingVadodara region; figure as published on Hariraj's previous programme page in 2023
- 8,000+
- Farmers reached across the trust's programmesOrganisation-wide foundation figure published on Hariraj's previous website; year and method not stated
- 40+
- Intervention villagesOrganisation-wide figure published on Hariraj's previous website; year not stated
- 1
- Farmer producer company promoted and facilitatedJafrabad Agricultural Producer Company Ltd., described on the earlier site as working since 2016
What we do not yet measure
What we can count here is farmers trained, groups formed and villages covered. What we cannot yet report is the thing that matters: whether a household spends less on inputs, earns more per bigha, or migrates less often after the training than before it. No baseline was recorded for the REEL group, so there is nothing honest to compare against, and we are not going to infer income change from attendance. The same applies to the vocational training — we know how many women were trained and not how many were still earning from it a year later. Both are gaps we would rather name than paper over.
Partners
- CottonConnect
- FLOCERT
- Better Cotton Initiative
