Practicing Anthropology

Realizing the multiple challenges of poverty, dwindling of the forest resources, depletion of groundwater, soil- pollution and food security of indigenous tribal farmers, in the context of climate change,  developed unique methods of Practicing Anthropology by unifying different Anthropological theories on the social, biological and economic concepts and field-tested the concept by introducing new social order and building appropriate social institutions, transfer of appropriate technology in different landscapes in India. Such approaches for introducing new social order and transfer of technology to address the issue of food security at one hand and climate change on the other by involving the community themselves as the partner of government functionaries have been appreciated and accepted by the ICAR, Government of India and the state governments of West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh. Experiments by the farmers helped them in developing knowledge and understanding about the functioning of their agricultural land, which is nested in a larger agro-ecosystem.  The farmers realized that any efforts for production at the agriculture land depend upon the effective functioning of the fringe forest, waterbody, wildlife which are interdependent and interconnected parts of the agro-ecosystem. Based on such learnings IBRAD developed approaches to ‘ Integrated Agro-Forest Mosaic Landscape Management’  and introduced  Organic Farming through the convergence of the different government functionaries like a forest, agriculture, livestock, and water resource management.  The approaches applied here has brought significant improvement in the livelihood of the community, in women empowerment  in particular and will gradually be favoring reaching the SDGs.

Interestingly, such approaches developed by IBRAD are in the line of  Forest and Farm  Facility, FAO which is for optimizing mitigation, adaptation and resilience services to climate change and facilitate an inclusive livelihood, food security for the smallholders.

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