The project began in 2008 with 55 farmers in the villages around Lakheri town of Bundi district with the aim to meet out the socio-economic challenges that poor and small farmers are facing. SRIJAN is working on productivity and profitability enhancement through Soybean. On the other hand, we are also promoting community institutions and linkages with institutional credit to meet the credit needs of these farmers.

In the year 2009-10, Soy Samriddhi reached 678 farmers covering 36 villages. Cost benefit and yield analysis was done for 673 was done to assess the effectiveness of our strategies.

Despite delayed monsoon and poor rainfall in the project region (53% less than normal), Soy Samriddhi farmers got 47% higher average yield than other farmers. Average yield per hectare was 1.3 ton/ha in comparison to 0.84 ton/ha in the district. Total acreage was 392 hectare and total production was 495.7 tons.

The SRI programme started in 2007 Shiggoan block of Haveri district (Karnataka). Till now we have reached over 600 farmers across 25 villages.

In the begining the team was facing difficulties to convince the farmers about SRI adoption. Because SRI is a new concept in this area. The team tried to motivate the farmers by using strategies such as external expoures, trainings, regular village meetings, etc to adopt SRI in larger area.

The overall the impact from the plots seem quite promising with 52% incremental increase in production and now the biggest challenge in front of us is to design low-cost SRI model for rain fed small and marginal farmers and reach 10,000 families through SRI.

To bridge the gaps around livelihood security and capacity building of women in small and marginal families a new initiative was started with support from SRTT in 2007 namely, “Strengthening Community Institutions for Water-Livelihoods Management in Malur Taluka of Kolar District, Karnataka”.

This project has been promoting improved package of practices of ragi (finger millet) for livelihood and food security of the small and marginal farmers under rain-fed condition apart from formation and strengthening the community institutions in the tank command villages .

In the year 2008-09 we reached 191 farmers across 27 villages.

In June 2009 project supported by ATMA was started to support the poor and marginal farmers for increasing their crop production through effective extension of agriculture technology in 5 locations in M.P namely, Sehore, Tikamgarh, Vidisha, Raisen, Sagar and Chhindwara. It also aimed at identifying improved practices and it’s dissemination among the farmers especially focusing on women by forming SHGs.

The basic model was developed based on Farmer Field School which is based on group approach, where a demo of 2.5 will be demonstrated (master trainer/farmer) to 25 student farmer (from different villages) who will learn the same practices and will apply in their own field and filter down to their own villages.

Till date, we have facilitated the formation of 14 farmer field schools with an outreach of over 750 farmers in these 6 blocks.