I work for tribal development in Odisha in India for children's education, improved land and natural resource use and enterprise development as part of Agragamee, a non-profit organisation. We have identified these widely differing fields as essential interventions to help the tribal community become self-reliant. We also address issues of human rights and social justice.

The natural resources in these regions, once abundant, are now highly denuded, and traditional patterns of shifting cultivation are now more destructive than anything else. Impoverishment, and hunger amongst the tribals is on the rise. Watershed and other NRM efforts have been able to rejuvenate commons, and develop plantations, but it has been difficult to reverse the overall trend. the overall poverty of the tribal communities. The search to help tribal communities become self-reliant has inevitably lead us to permaculture.

Agragamee's efforts in permaculture, or perhaps sustainable agriculture, has been to help tribal farmers integrate local monsoon cultivation with income generating crops like mango in family farms through organic farming principles to establish viable family farms. In its own campus, Agragamee practices zero till cultivation, integrating Masanobu Fukuoka's principles of natural farming for rainfed as well as irrigated cultivation.