Our Experience

Sunhara India (Prosperous India): Technical Assistance

Increasing Rural Incomes by Linking Indian Farmers to High-Value Agriculture

Country Challenges: Agriculture forms the backbone of the Indian economy, employing approximately two-thirds of the workforce. Despite efforts to mechanize Indian agriculture in the 1990s, India remains a country of small farms on which peasants cultivate ancestral lands with manual and cattle labor, with limited productivity and labor efficiency. Moreover, Indian farm size continues to decline with each successive generation because of current land regulations and family inheritance practices.

Smaller farming plots present unique challenges on maintaining and increasing agricultural productivity levels to access and profitably supply commercial markets.

Project Response: The three-year Sunhara India, or “Prosperous India,” project aims to reduce poverty in India’s rural areas by increasing the incomes of smallholder and marginal farmers, including women farmers.

The $4.2 million initiative will improve farmers’ agricultural productivity and link farmers to higher-value horticulture activities. The project also seeks gains for both smallholder farmers and other market players by boosting efficiencies throughout the horticulture market system.

Innovations: Sunhara is a holistic, market-systems approach to increasing agricultural productivity and profitability. As a holistic approach, it recognizes both formal and informal rules governing local markets and takes a long view on results toward achieving sustainable, systemic change.

Sunhara will showcase successful high-value agricultural value chain models and disseminate lessons learned from farmers’ efforts to better respond to local market demand and opportunities.

The project team also will seek commercially viable solutions to value chain constraints, with the potential to stimulate and carry forward changes in the complete value chain system.

Project Strategy: Sunhara’s aims align with the current strategic opportunities in the Indian government’s latest five-year plan, with emphasis on developing economic prospects for poor farmers and producers, and reducing gender disparities through greater inclusion of women’s groups in development.

The project also builds on the experience and lessons of previous and ongoing projects in India, implemented by ASI’s affiliate ACDI/VOCA, and other donors.

The project is designed around three interlinked components:

Farmer outreach: target inefficient production practices by helping to deliver extension information and new technologies from various public and private sector channels. This outreach includes training input retailers by input suppliers, modernizing extension delivery and using information communication technology (ICT) solutions for service delivery.
Market access and development: focus on establishing direct links between farmers and various buyers, such as exporters, retail chains, farmer federations and local retailers (e.g., push-cart vendor federations), and enhancing farmers’ knowledge on how to use traditional marketing infrastructure and institutions.
On-farm economic activities for women: engage women-managed small and medium-sized enterprise activities to promote alternative incomes and enhance social empowerment through economic initiatives.

For more information on the Sunhara India project, please contact Managing Director Deo Datt Singh at dsingh@asi-india.org.

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