Harit Bharat Fund: Strengthening India's Restoration Economy Through Collective Action

Shweta Prajapati
Manager, Communications,
Food, Land and Water, WRI India

Kavita Sharma
Senior Manager,
Food, Land and Water, WRI India

The Harit Bharat Fund is a collaborative initiative bringing together ecosystem stakeholders to mobilize capital and capacities for local organisations restoring India's landscapes starting with central India. To know more about the Fund, click here.

INTRODUCTION

Restoring landscapes in India presents a unique opportunity for its people as well as environment, as it can help sustain the flow of valuable ecosystem services, ensure food and nutritional security, and improve livelihoods, enhancing their resilience against climate risks. Adopting a landscape approach to context-specific restoration interventions can provide equitable growth opportunities, by offering new and sustainable avenues for local economic development through improved market linkages and

creation of sustainable livelihoods. This presents a strategic advantage for businesses invested in sustainability. To fully capitalize on this opportunity, it is essential to foster the growth of restoration-focused businesses capable of translating this potential into actual benefits.

Objective, Nature and Ambition

Accelerating efforts in this direction, the Harit Bharat Fund aims to bolster locally-led restoration interventions across the country, starting in the three central Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Maharashtra. Launched in 2023, Harit Bharat Fund is a unique program designed to mobilize ecosystem support from national and local governments, civil society organizations, philanthropists, venture capitalists, and impact

investors for supporting local restoration champions. This mix of financial assistance, capacity building and conducive policies can help them scale innovative restoration solutions across Central India that can be replicated in the rest of the country.

With people’s priorities at the center and a clear focus on equitable and inclusive development, Harit Bharat Fund envisions a resilient land restoration-based economy for local communities, where they embrace viable business models and interventions at scale that protect and restore their forests, farms, and common lands.

Addressing key challenges of capital and capacity gaps

While several locally-led projects by NGOs and startups/businesses are committed to restoring India’s landscapes and excel in their restoration efforts, only a few are able to access sufficient financing and relevant capacity-building support. Particularly within the business sphere, small and medium enterprises, and entrepreneurs, struggle to secure patient growth capital during their scaling phase. This challenge to access markets and investments for the restoration champions also stems from the lack of right kind of capacities required to build sustainable business models, and limited access to monitoring techniques and knowledge that could measure and communicate progress of their restoration interventions.

Recognizing these issues, the Harit Bharat Fund seeks to equip restoration champions with knowledge, capacity, capital and connections and enable them to scale their interventions. The Fund supports non-profits through catalytic philanthropic grants and for-profit enterprises through patient capital in the form of collateral free loans. It is also difficult for businesses to access capital from institutional and commercial lenders who perceive their restoration business models to be risky given their long

gestation periods and cyclical nature. The Fund aims to address this risk aversion by implementing risk-sharing mechanisms through the emerging blended finance framework which is opening new doors for impact investors also to invest more in such restoration businesses.

Projects supported under Harit Bharat Fund benefit significantly from targeted capacity-building inputs focused on developing sustainable business models, establishing a robust monitoring, reporting, and verification system, and technical assistance for scaling and building innovative market linkages for smallholders and local communities.

Key stakeholders: Harit Bharat Fund is a collaborative initiative led by a consortium of donors and partners who bring in their diverse expertise. This growing initiative currently includes India Climate Collaborative, Pune Knowledge Cluster, Sangam, Spectrum Impact, Transforming Rural India Foundation, WRI India, and WRI with support from the Principal Scientific Advisor’s office, Government of India.

Interventions supported: Harit Bharat Fund supports a diverse range of innovative restoration solutions such as tree-based interventions (including agroforestry, agri-horti-forestry, and bamboo plantation), watershed management, grassland restoration, sustainable agriculture, integrated natural resource management, riparian restoration and developing market linkages for small holders engaged in sustainable farming.

The Fund also supports restoration champions working on developing value chains for non-timber forest products and crops or food produce that can combat climate change, enhance resilience through mitigation and adaptation efforts, conserve and enrich local biodiversity, and foster sustainable livelihood opportunities for local people.

Action and Impact

Embarking on its first phase in three Central Indian states - Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, the Harit Bharat Fund will soon announce its first cohort of Restoration Champions who will implement diverse innovative restoration interventions embracing decades of local traditional and scientific knowledge.

With enhanced capacities and investments, these restoration champions can help address India’s development and environmental challenges in a most efficient and sustainable way. Contributing to healthier, sustainably managed landscapes, these champions can pave the way forward through their innovative restoration-based businesses and foster a locally-led, landscape-based, restoration economy in India.