Rural and Environment Development Society (REDS)

REDS has been tackling various aspects of rural social and environmental crises for the past two decades. Its work on agrarian crisis is multi-dimensional and has been supported by AID since 2016, in the most drought-prone district of Andhra Pradesh. It has achieved remarkable progress on multiple fronts – from helping farmer suicide families access crucial support, to formation of women-only farmer cooperatives, to working on sustainable agriculture models and linking with government programs on millets and natural farming, to tackling social problems of migration, human trafficking and exploitation of women in the face of the agrarian crisis.

Activities

• Build on government programs for sustainable agriculture, especially the Community-managed Natural Farming and Millets programs

• Engage with village level Rythu Bharosa centres of government, and exert local pressure to ensure that the Rythu Bharosa centres work for the farmers’ welfare providing integrated services.

• Help strengthen Women Farmers’ FPO and Collective Farming experiment, including Millet Processing Unit, value addition, marketing; establishing Seed Banks

• Ensure improvement and implementation of Crop Cultivator Rights Act for tenant farmers: The work being done by REDS in the Comprehensive Revival of Millets program, APCNF (Natural Farming) and Navadhanya program (promoting crop diversity through inter-cropping), can be understood through the attached reports. In view of this, the support for the key human resources to anchor and expand the work. As seen in last year’s work, our strength is leveraging of other resources. For example, by supporting a couple of field activists, we are able to leverage several lakhs of rupees of support for farmer suicide families from various sources. More importantly, we are able to get much larger government support for the families. Similarly, by working with the government to design programs that scale up sustainable agriculture models, we are leveraging huge government resources to help small farmers. The critical element is to support the team of people who are making this happen and expand that team.

• Support to women in distress including cases of domestic violence; trafficked and rescued women, and women facing other social and legal problems.

• Livelihood support to women in distress and vulnerable conditions for taking up income generation activities for a respectful and independent life.