Gram Vikas Conferred With 10th Earth Care Award 2022

Gram Vikas Conferred With 10th Earth Care Award 2022

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

Gram Vikas has conferred the award in “Community Based Climate Action” category in a ceremony conducted at The National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai on 3rd June 2022. The chief guest of the event, Aditya Uddhav Thackeray, Cabinet 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 program instituted in the year 2008, that recognizes 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. 

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 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 marginalised rural people and their communities to live a dignified quality of life”.