Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav on Wednesday, 17 June 2026 met tribal community members from Nandurbar, Maharashtra, underscoring the importance of their active participation in the GoI–UNDP–GEF Landscape Restoration Project — a joint initiative linking international climate finance with community-driven ecological recovery.

Context

During the interaction, Yadav highlighted the contribution of Smt Savitabai Pawra, a President's Award winner from Nandurbar, whose community-managed native seed bank is actively conserving indigenous crop varieties and bolstering local biodiversity. He described her work as an inspiration for scaling community-led restoration across the region.

Posting on X, the Minister wrote: 'Inspired by Smt Savitabai Pawra, President's Award winner, whose native seed bank is helping conserve indigenous biodiversity and strengthen community-led ecological restoration. Together, we are building resilient landscapes and sustainable livelihoods.'

Policy Backdrop

Nandurbar is a tribal-majority district in northern Maharashtra, home to Bhil, Pawra and other Scheduled Tribe communities with substantial forest and degraded-land areas. The GoI–UNDP–GEF Landscape Restoration Project channels Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding through UNDP to support community-driven restoration of degraded landscapes, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable livelihoods.

India's engagement with landscape restoration has deep policy roots. The country joined the Bonn Challenge in 2015 with a pledge to restore 13 million hectares of degraded land, a commitment later scaled up to 26 million hectares at UNFCCC COP14 in 2018. Domestically, the Forest Rights Act, 2006 mandates tribal gram sabhas' participation in conservation and restoration planning — providing the legal scaffolding for projects like the one in Nandurbar.

Native seed banks, of the kind maintained by Savitabai Pawra, are recognised under the National Action Plan on Climate Change as low-cost, community-anchored complements to large-scale government afforestation drives.

Stakeholders and Impact

The primary beneficiaries are forest-dependent tribal households across Nandurbar and similar Schedule V districts in Maharashtra. Community-managed seed banks preserve indigenous genetic diversity that commercial agriculture and monoculture plantations routinely displace, making them critical buffers against climate-driven crop failure.

By spotlighting Savitabai Pawra's model, the Ministry is signalling that grassroots custodians — rather than state agencies alone — are central to India's international biodiversity and restoration commitments. This framing also reinforces the Government's narrative of convergence between tribal welfare and environmental diplomacy.

What's Next

Attention will now turn to the mid-term evaluation reports of the ongoing GoI–UNDP–GEF project, which will test whether community participation metrics translate into measurable landscape recovery on the ground. Policymakers and civil-society groups are also watching whether the Pawra seed-bank model is formally replicated in other Schedule V districts across Maharashtra and beyond.

With India's international climate credibility increasingly tied to demonstrable progress on its 26-million-hectare restoration pledge, the Minister's engagement in Nandurbar suggests the Centre is keen to showcase community-led successes ahead of upcoming multilateral reviews.