A walk through the local market, in the Mangatola village in Ambagarh chowki block of Rajnandgaon District, Chhattisgarh is like a walk in the ocean of fishes; different varieties and size of fishes are bought and sold here if you know how to bargain.

With men displaying their freshly caught fishes on the plastic sheets, the sound of yelling, shouting and bargaining will almost make you deaf. 

The village is habituated by tribal population and surrounded with thick forest and hilly mountains. The tribal herein depends on on-farm and off-farm activities such as cattle rearing, poultry and piggery etc. for their livelihood. Even though the forest and village have a lot of resources for their sustenance, but they do not make use of these resources only limited to routine activities like farming and gathering of forest produces.

Caritas India in partnership with Samarthan is working in this area to empower the tribal community to improve access of various schemes and programmes, enhancing the income of families through on- and off-farm livelihood initiatives. 

Gram Niram program team has observed that the village has a lot of natural resources like pond, sand, mountains and government building but the need was to manage and prepare a plan for utilization. The team put forth the proposal to CBOs members (farmer & women SHG) to start-up fish farming collectively in the village pond. Reflecting on this, CBO members agreed on it and further placed this suggestion before Gram Sabha and hence a plan was drawn.   

42 members from farmer club and women SHG formed Machhua Sahkari Samiti and opened the bank account with the support of Gram Nirman team and also linked to fishery department, who will support them with training and fish seedlings freely. 

The members have put the seedlings in the village pond and started working together under the supervision of the fishery department and Gram Nirman program team of Caritas India. As a result, their hard work began paying off during the tough time of COVID 19, when people had no money to feed their stomach. The members sold the fish in the local market and managed their livelihood. They earned around INR 20000 which was distributed among members. 

This collective initiative motivated many people of the village and now they are working together with Gram Sabha to develop village resource management plan. Moreover, the surrounding villages are also learning from Mangatola village to manage their natural resources.