Photo Courtesy: India Today Group
Guwahati: The GEF-Small Grants Programme reached over 11,000 people in Assam and Meghalaya during its first two years. Most beneficiaries are farmers. Sixty-one percent of those helped work in agriculture. Officials confirmed the project improved management across 17,000 hectares of land. It also restored 2,800 hectares of territory.
The initiative spans 250 villages across 11 districts. It added 182 kW of renewable solar capacity. The program is run by the Environment, Forest and Climate Change Ministry and the UNDP. The Energy and Resources Institute serves as the host, while the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Guwahati acts as the knowledge partner. The Northeast remains one of three core regions for this work.
Project lead Abhinandan Saikia emphasized the program's scope. He stated, "The OP7 aimed to enable communities and organisations in some of the most vulnerable and least developed areas to take collective action through a participatory landscape planning and management approach aimed at enhancing socio-ecological resilience through innovative livelihood options producing local and global environmental benefits."
A recent two-day conference in Guwahati brought together 150 farmers, practitioners, and representatives from 22 NGOs. Manish Kumar Pandey, the national coordinator for SGP-India at TERI, noted that the goal is to push grassroots work toward larger financial support. Future efforts, including the upcoming OP8, will continue to emphasize community-driven sustainability.
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