Climate Justice
Agriculture is the entry point, not the destination. Soil, seed, water, food and income are linked with women’s leadership, collective institutions and public investment.
He Came Back From Rajasthan With a Method, and Tested It on Eight Biswa
An exposure visit is usually where learning stops. He treated it as the beginning of an experiment.
Lalaram, a member of Jamuna Aajeevika Adhikar Sangathan, decided to grow bitter gourd from seed he had retained himself, using a method he had learned on an exposure visit to Rajasthan. He did not report back on the visit. He brought the idea home, adapted it and tested it.
The record is unusually complete. Eight biswa, direct planting of the Aman Shri variety on 8 June 2025. First harvest 10 August, final picking 13 October: 127 days. Total yield ten quintals.
The costs matter as much as the yield. Because the seed was his own, the sheet assigns no seed cost. The land was his. Cow dung and jeevamrit replaced purchased fertiliser and fungicide. Irrigation is listed at nothing. Land preparation ₹1,000, labour ₹4,000. Total input cost ₹5,000.
Gross income ₹25,100. Net return ₹20,100. One row of the original bilingual form is mislabelled, so the arithmetic and units need a final check - but the value of this record is that dates, area, production and costs were captured together, at the time, rather than reconstructed later as a general claim about increased income.
Lalaram says the method worked, that he was pleased with the production, and that other farmers should try it. Before publication that should be re-recorded in his own words and his own language.
DEHAT did not grow the crop. It enabled a process by which a farmer could see a practice, question it and decide whether to test it. He supplied the seed, the land, the labour and the judgement.
On seed the climate argument is straightforward. Retaining your own seed and using biological inputs reduces dependence on purchases. One plot does not prove a method and no season is risk-free. What it does is widen a small farmer’s range of options, which is the practical form resilience takes.
Because the seed was his own, the sheet assigns no seed cost.
A Season of Evidence, Recorded Properly
Field documentation - dates, area, costs, yield, written down as it happens - is what lets one farmer’s experiment become a neighbour’s decision. It is the least funded part of agricultural work.
One farmer’s costed trial is not proof of a method. It is the unit this whole programme is built to multiply - here is how.
The programme treats women farmers as central actors in the rural transition rather than as beneficiaries at its edge. Ecological practice, household nutrition, collective institutions and access to public schemes are pursued together, because a family that can feed itself and earn near home does not have to send a child away to work.
Why This Work Matters
Small and marginal holdings, seasonal fallowing, input costs, flood exposure, uneven irrigation, declining agricultural biodiversity and limited market power create overlapping risks. These pressures reach into household food, nutrition, migration, schooling and safety. A purely technical farm intervention cannot resolve them.
How Change Happens
Women-led Aajeevika Adhikar Sangathans and farmer groups become spaces for learning, leadership and representation, working with the agriculture, horticulture and rural development departments.
“Rural families strengthen ecological, economic and civic resilience together - and the household that earns steadily is the household whose children stay in school.”
Nutrition-sensitive agriculture, kitchen gardens, pulse cultivation and diversified local food production.
Soil and water conservation, water testing and irrigation access in flood- and drought-exposed geographies.
Low external input sustainable agriculture, seed conservation and adaptation led by women farmers.
Local livelihoods and market linkage that reduce distress-driven migration.
Farmer federations working with the agriculture, horticulture and rural development departments.
The Structural Vulnerability Cycle, Read From This Programme.
Climate Justice works on the household economy and food system that decide whether a child has to leave.
This newborn is never put to the breast in time. In Maharajganj, 87% of babies miss feeding in the first hour - losing the earliest, most protective nourishment of their lives.
Year-round household food availability through nutrition-sensitive agriculture.
National Family Health Survey 5 · Maharajganj (86.6%) - highest in the belt
Resilience Cannot Be Delivered. It Must Be Built With Communities.
Climate variability is no longer a future concern. Changing rainfall patterns, water stress and declining productivity of natural resources already shape how households farm, earn, eat and plan. But climate impacts are rarely experienced as a single environmental event. They travel through livelihoods, food systems, migration patterns, local economies and access to public services.
What remains within communities after the project ends?
How Vulnerability Deepens
Environmental stress triggers a chain of interconnected pressures across livelihoods, migration, nutrition and community systems. This is not a fixed sequence; communities enter it through different pathways. Select a stage to follow the chain.
The Programme in Practice
Three interconnected domains reinforce one another through community institutions, local leadership and collective action. The roots are the long-term investments made within communities. The trunk is the collective systems that connect them. The canopy is what emerges as those foundations strengthen.
At the heart of this approach are Aajeevika Adhikar Sangathans and other community institutions that serve as platforms for learning, leadership, representation and local action.
Theory of Change
Communities are able to adapt to climate stress, reduce vulnerability, strengthen local systems and shape resilient futures across generations. Six pathways carry that goal.
A staged farming journey - Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture, moving to Natural Farming, and aiming towards Organic Farming certification - alongside diversified crops and natural resource stewardship.
From Monitoring Communities to Community Intelligence
Resilience does not evolve every three years. Rainfall shifts, water availability fluctuates, migration decisions change from season to season, new women leaders emerge. The next frontier is not measuring resilience more frequently, but enabling communities to continuously understand and respond to the changes shaping their own futures.
A Phased Investment Roadmap
Not every investment serves the same purpose. Some expand interventions that have already demonstrated impact. Others test new approaches, generate evidence, or build the systems required for communities to continuously adapt. Mapped in direct consultation with the communities we work with, over a planning process that ran from 2021 to 2026.
What Makes the Approach Different
Many climate programmes focus primarily on improving agricultural outcomes. DEHAT’s experience suggests that resilience frequently breaks elsewhere: when nutrition remains weak, when community institutions dissolve, when women lack decision-making power, when governance systems remain inaccessible, or when migration disrupts local continuity.
Every Project, in Chronological Order
10 / 10 · 2003 – 2025Cumulative across every farming community this programme has worked with. Money the community has drawn from government schemes because of this work is shown once, under Rights & Entitlements. Community-based organisations this work has capacity-built are shown once, under School of Leadership.
Everything Above Is on the Record. Choose How You Want to Be Part of What Comes Next.
The register above lists 10 projects in this programme, each with the partner who funded it and what it did. Support of any kind is welcome on the same terms.