Odisha Based Gram Vikas Conferred With 10th Earth Care Award

Bhubaneswar: Gram Vikas has received the 10^th Earth Care Award 2022 for excellence in Climate Change Mitigation and Adaption.  The award recognises Gram Vikas’ long-standing work in empowering village communities to address the rapidly deteriorating ecological balance.  It helps them to adapt to the challenges posed by climate change to access water, livelihoods, and well-being and thereby enables them to live a dignified life.

Since 1985, Gram Vikas has been addressing challenges to livelihood insecurity of Adivasi communities due to massive deforestation, by regenerating private and community wasteland through plantations of fruit, fuel, and timber yielding species. Gram Vikas promotes a ‘tribal ecosystem-based farming’ system, based on a ridge-to-valley principle, which includes protection of forest in the upper reaches, followed by social forestry, horticulture plantation, upland crops and finally, cultivation of vegetables in the valley. Capacity building of village communities ensures community ownership over processes, outcomes and sustainability.

Gram Vikas was conferred the award in the ‘’Community Based Climate Action’’ category at a ceremony conducted at NCPA Mumbai on June 3. The Chief Guest of the event, Aaditya Uddhav Thackeray, Minister of Tourism and Environment, Government of Maharashtra, presented the award.

The Earth Care Awards (ECAs) is a joint initiative of JSW and The Times of India group. It is a national awards programme instituted in 2008, that recognises locally evolved transformative models and solutions that address the need for building or enhancing the climate resilience capacities of the vulnerable groups, infrastructures, systems, and processes that drive climate actions.

Gram Vikas is a community development organisation working in Odisha and Jharkhand since 1979.  It works with rural and tribal communities to help them lead a dignified life by building capacities, strengthening community institutions, and mobilising resources.  So far, it has empowered the lives of 5,50,980 people across 2451 villages in Odisha and Jharkhand.  It works with a mission to “promote processes which are sustainable, socially inclusive and gender-equitable, to enable critical masses of poor and marginalized rural people and their communities to live a dignified quality of life”.