The mission of Dharamitra is to bring about the sustainable development of rural people by the judicious management of natural resources and promotion of ecological agriculture. The organisation promotes appropriate eco fNCdly technologies to address problems faced by marginalised rural people so as to conserve the environment and promote sustainable development.
Dietary based anaemia is a wide-spread problem, especially amongst young women. The area is facing an acute agrarian crisis. One of its causes is climate change and the increasingly unpredictable monsoon resultant crop failure. Farmers increasingly extract ground water through bore wells to overcome this misfortune. To dig bore wells, farmers borrow at prohibitively high rates of interest from private money lenders, and the ground water table is dropping rapidly.
The initiative is supported by Dharamitra. A range of activities are undertaken including sustainable agriculture and income generation, alternative cultivation practices and organic recycling and renewable energy. Soil and water conservation, greening of land through tree cover and introduction of bio-diversified systems in farming. The farmers in each village have organized into « Farmers’ Study Groups », which are facilitated by a trained motivator, who is a young practicing farmer from the same village.
Dharamitra has supported the agroecological transition by providing farmers with access to viable nonchemical agricultural practices through training, demonstration and exposure visits. Follow up and monitoring has helped address any problems and data on crop yields as well as cost-benefit of crop production has been collected and analysed. The randomly collected soil samples from farms of the beneficiaries are also analysed for physical, chemical and microbial parameters.
Research and technical innovation has supported the agroecological initiative. Scientific validation of the qualities of liquid manures (Panchgavya, Armitpani and five variants of Sanjeevak) involved chemical analysis of plant nutrients and microbial and fungal analysis and revealed that these organic growth promoters contained beneficial microbial populations which helped in soil amelioration.