Food, forests, water, and livelihoods were once woven together. The story of how three clusters in Maharashtra are restoring that connection, carries lessons far beyond the Western Ghats.
When a Connected System Begins to Fall Apart
For generations, farming families in Akole lived in rhythm with the forests, slopes, and seasonal rains of the Western Ghats.
Fields were small but diverse. Millets, pulses, oilseeds, dozens of rice varieties, and fruit trees shaped what was grown and what was eaten. Forests offered wild foods, fodder, and medicine. Communities held knowledge of seeds, soils, seasons, and wild plants refined over centuries.
Over time, economic pressures and climate stress shifted the balance. Paddy replaced diversity. Forests thinned. Soils eroded on the steep slopes. Once the cropping season ended, 42% of households sought casual labour opportunities, and 28% moved to nearby towns for daily wages. Soil, water, biodiversity, energy, and nutrition, once held together as a system, had gradually come apart.
The story unfolds across three clusters in Maharashtra, each with its own character: Akole’s hilly agroforestry terrain, Igatpuri’s forest-fringe farming systems, and Shahada’s tribal, water-stressed landscapes. Together, they reflect challenges that smallholder communities face across the world, which is what makes this work significant beyond the Western Ghats.
What the landscape held
Beneath the visible strain, three things remained intact: deep indigenous knowledge held by women and elders, strong community institutions, and remarkable biological richness in seeds, soils, and forests. These became the foundation the recovery was built on.
Science and communities, working at the scale of a landscape
The CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes (MFL) Programme is built on the principle that agriculture, biodiversity, water, livelihoods, and climate resilience are most effectively addressed together, across an entire landscape, rather than sector by sector. In Maharashtra, this programme builds on the earlier Nature-Positive Solutions (NPS) initiative operated from 2022 to 2024, integrating it with the learnings from Agroecology Initiative.
The three Maharashtra clusters were chosen thoughtfully, each representing a distinct agroecological reality, together forming a living laboratory for integrated, nature-positive approaches that can inform practice well beyond this region.
The partnership runs deep, from global research centres to village institutions. CGIAR centres, including the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), anchor the global research framework. National institutions including ICAR-NIASM, MPKV, and NBPGR bring domain expertise. State agencies, civil society organisations, and communities themselves shape what that science looks like on the ground.
Where Research Meets the Field: BAIF’s Role in the Programme
Founded in 1967, BAIF Development Research Foundation has built its work on a single, enduring idea: that sustainable livelihoods grow from communities, rooted in the land and knowledge they already possess. Today, BAIF reaches 4 million families in more than 100,000 villages of 18 states, with a multidisciplinary team of more than 7500 people.
In the MFL programme, BAIF functions as the key implementation partner, co-creating interventions with communities, generating field-based evidence, and connecting indigenous knowledge with scientific tools. BAIF’s approach is participatory at every stage: communities co-design what is tested on their land, evaluate what works on their own terms, and own what continues. Farmers are researchers. Women are conservationists. Elders are the knowledge archive.
Three threads, one landscape
The work spans three interconnected areas: agrobiodiversity, landscape restoration, and circular bioeconomy, each reinforcing the other.
Agrobiodiversity
Three community seed banks now conserve 125 indigenous crop landraces and 288 local cultivars across 1,550 farming households, held as living repositories of centuries of farmer selection. Through participatory varietal selection, 377 farmers evaluated 138 traditional varieties across 500 plots, ranking them by yield, climate resilience, fodder value, and taste. Eleven wild food and biodiversity festivals brought together 650 participants, reviving knowledge of more than 150 wild food crops and recipes that had faded from daily practice. Seeds of nutrient-rich vegetables reached 50 women-led self-help groups, bringing dietary diversity closer.
Landscape Restoration
Micro-watersheds became the entry point. In two pilot watersheds in Akole, covering 200 hectares, soil and water conservation planning was co-designed with farmers and research partners. Within a year of intervention, the pilot watersheds recorded an 18% reduction in soil loss, a 21% decline in carbon loss, and improved water infiltration even under higher rainfall. Farm ponds extended water availability through dry months. On community lands in Shahada, 18,200 saplings and 6,000 seeds were planted across 19 hectares through convergence. Agroforestry systems combining fruit trees, fodder grasses, and bamboo stabilised slopes and reduced pressure on forests. Twenty-four farming families introduced bee hives, flower strips, and nectar-rich crops, rebuilding pollinator habitats and natural pest control, restoring local ecosystem services.
Circular Bioeconomy
Firewood dependence had long connected energy, forest pressure, and women’s drudgery in a single knot. Household biogas units now provide clean cooking energy equivalent to 12 LPG cylinders or 2.6 tonnes of firewood per year, while producing organic manure for fields. A school-level unit at an Adivasi residential school in Akole converts 30 kg of food waste daily into cooking fuel. In Shahada, a community biochar unit managed by a Farmer Producer Company converts cotton stalk residues into soil-enhancing inputs and biochar-based value-added products, with 32 farmers trained in production, value addition and enterprise management. The Circular Bioeconomy Innovation Hub platform, inaugurated in 2023 with its physical secretariat at BAIF’s Central Research Station, brings together partners to scale circular bio economy-based innovations and builds enterprise skills among women and youth. The Circular Bio Economy Innovation Challenge organised for startups, provided a platform for innovators to present their ideas and upscale their innovations to business models.
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Innovation challenges conducted
475+
people trained
10+
Innovation Hub partners
When Everything Connects: Farms, Forests and Families Rebuild Together
Mandabai, Akole cluster
Smallholder farmer: 7.5 acres
When farm pond development and solar irrigation improved water availability on her land, Mandabai moved beyond a single cropping season for the first time. Vegetables joined the staple crops. Then followed strawberries, which she independently expanded the following season, because the economics worked. A household biogas unit replaced firewood collection. The organic slurry feeds her fields. The kitchen is cleaner. The workload has shifted. Her farm now offers work through the year, and the family stayed together. Mandabai’s is one of many stories across the clusters where water, nutrition, energy, and markets have come together in a single family’s life, each intervention reinforcing the next.
Across the clusters, the gains are visible across every dimension the programme set out to strengthen. Fields are more diverse, with farmer-to-farmer seed exchange active again at the grassroots level. Diets are richer, as wild foods return to kitchen tables and kitchen gardens supply vegetables through lean seasons. Households that once spent hours collecting firewood now cook on clean energy, with the slurry from biogas units feeding back into their soils. Watersheds hold soil longer. Pollinators are returning. Young farmers talk about experimentation, not exit.
Women have been central to this rebuilding, leading seed systems, documenting wild foods, managing community nurseries, and driving biodiversity festivals that have become spaces for intergenerational knowledge exchange. Youth have engaged in mango variety documentation, participated in crowdsourced varietal trials, and taken up biochar enterprise development. Market linkages have strengthened alongside this community action. At Bhimthadi Jatra and similar platforms, Farmer Producer Organisation members have showcased and sold native rice and millet varieties directly to urban consumers, testing demand, refining branding and packaging, and building evidence that traditional grains have a market well beyond the village
Building landscapes that hold
Across Akole, Igatpuri, and Shahada, the shift is sustained and runs deep. What has taken root here grew from cocreation — communities and researchers designing, testing, and evaluating solutions together, with ownership resting where it belongs: with the people on the land.
The gains span all three dimensions the programme set out to strengthen. Ecologically, soils are healthier, watersheds more resilient, and biodiversity more actively conserved. Socially, women lead, youth innovate, and indigenous knowledge is being documented and passed on. Economically, diversified farms, clean energy, and emerging market pathways for traditional crops are reducing dependence on a single season and a single income source.
From Maharashtra to a global evidence base
The evidence generated in these three clusters, on soil health, participatory varietal selection, watershed management, and circular bioeconomy models, feeds directly into CGIAR’s broader MFL Programme. Maharashtra’s clusters inform integrated landscape approaches in rainfed smallholder contexts across South Asia and beyond..
Challenges of climate variability, market access, and livelihood security are real and ongoing. And the programme continues to generate the evidence, build the institutions, and strengthen the community capacity to meet them, season by season, village by village.
Read the full Impact Report
The BAIF Impact Report on Advancing Multifunctional Landscapes documents the evidence, methods, and people behind this work in detail.
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