An initiative that aims to increase income, to ensure nutrition security and environmental sustainability of 500 tribal families over a period of 6 years was launched in Kolli Hills in Tamil Nadu, South India. One of the core components of the programme is the ‘Multi-storey Mixed Farming’ training to tribal farmers. This programme will provide opportunity to tribal farmers to modify lands for multi-storey farming of fruit trees, cash crops, and forest trees. Training will be provided on soil and water conservation to ensure sustainability. The other components of this programme are to provide training on health and women development, institution development, training and capacity building of tribal community for community based production, pre-cleaning and marketing of local produces.

This MSSRF NABARD Tribal Development programme was inaugurated at Kolli Hills on 11-12 November 2019. The Chief General Manager of NABARD, Smt Padma Ragunathan inaugurated the programme and the Executive Director of MSSRF, Dr N Anilkumar delivered the special address. Shri SK Dinesh, the DDM of NABARD, Namakkal, Dr ED Israel Oliver King, Principal Scientist at MSSRF, members of KHABCOFED and KHABCOL, staff members of MSSRF and many tribal families participated in the event.

For more than a decade our research Foundation is extending training programmes to improve the tribal livelihood at Kolli hills. It is significant that the previous project that started in 2010 had covered over 1000 families.