With the Covid-19 crisis impacting the rabi season, Caritas India is gearing up for the upcoming Kharif season with better planning. Food and nutrition security program ‘Sanjivani’ has organized three days of program review cum training on 19,20 & 21, April 2022 at Indore for the partners and staff to materialize better planning for the Kharif crop season.

Presiding over the meeting, Nirmal Minj, State Program Associate, Gujarat stated that ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’ and often due to various reasons the statement becomes true for most marginalized farmers in the program. Since most farmers depend on rain-fed agriculture and also struggle due to drastic climate change, it becomes much more important to have better plans for Kharif crop cultivation that would yield increased food crop production, said Nirmal.

Though the Sanjivani program has seen challenges in its first half of implementation due to the Covid pandemic, the implementing partners and project participants have achieved impressive results. The program ensured greater food availability with at least a 30% increase in the yields of food crops and incomes with indigenized, integrated and climate-resilient farming practices. The target population has leveraged the benefits of Government schemes/programmes linked to food security, especially the Public Distribution System (PDS) & Integrated Child Development Schemes (ICDS).

The training programme facilitated by Mukund Deshmukh- Assistant Programme lead – SABAL has helped participants to increase their knowledge on better planning for Kharif crop cultivation to achieve the expected results of the project. The focus was given on increasing food crop cultivation area, promotion of minor millet cultivation, sustainable agriculture practices, agro-ecological methods of cultivation, localized farming, and development of nutrition kitchen gardens systematically. The knowledge and information shared with project participants will help to facilitate the effective implementation and leads to an increase in food crop production in the coming Kharif season.

Altogether, 23 participants took part in this meeting including 4 Caritas India West Zone staff, 6 Sanjivani implementing Diocesan Directors, 6 project Outreach Workers and 6 Community educators and 3 participants from potential new partners from Janvikas Indore and Carmelite Sisters of Charity -Unai of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.