Reviving an island's farming life.

An island of farmland, going fallow.

Chorao is one of the largest islands on the Mandovi, a short ferry ride from Panaji. Its khazan lands — a centuries-old paddy-cum-fish system carved out of mangrove — once defined the rhythm of the year. By the late 2000s, much of that farmland was thinning out: labour had become scarce and expensive, the second winter paddy crop had largely been abandoned, and few of the next generation saw farming as a viable livelihood.

The Chorao-Madel Farmers' Club was registered with NABARD in February 2008, beginning with twenty-two members under the leadership of Premanand Mahambare, a retired schoolteacher. The Club's stated aims were straightforward — revive agriculture in Chodan and Madel, address shared problems collectively, and build entrepreneurial capacity among its members. What it lacked was the technical, financial and marketing scaffolding to turn those aims into outcomes.

That gap is where this engagement began.

Five threads, woven over seven seasons.

Working out of TERI's Western Regional Centre, with multi-year support from the Toyota Foundation and operational backing from NABARD Goa via Central Bank of India, the programme spanned five interconnected initiatives. The intent was never to run the Club from the outside; it was to put brand, market, machinery and infrastructure into the hands of farmers who already knew how to farm.

i. Chorao Red Kernel Rice — building a brand from a heritage grain

End-to-end product work for the Club's signature red-kernel rice: brand identity, packaging design, the story that travelled on the pack, and a distribution route into local supermarkets so that a traditional Goan grain could find shelf space alongside national rice brands.

ii. Chorao Mancurad Mangoes — premium packaging and direct sales

A quality grading process and packaging system for the Club's heritage Mancurad mangoes, sold under the brand AAMche Chorao Mancurad directly to households across eleven Goan neighbourhoods — Bambolim, Caranzalem, Dona Paula, Fontainhas, Merces, Miramar, Panjim, Porvorim, Ribandar, Santacruz and Taleigao — with test-market sales into Mumbai and a corporate gifting line, moving the fruit out of the wholesale market and into a premium, traceable channel.

iii. Organic vegetable farming — training, pilots, subscribers

A handheld transition into organic vegetable cultivation with twenty-one Club farmers, supported through training sessions and farm-level pilots — including a structured exotic-vegetables experiment with broccoli, Chinese cabbage and capsicum — with the harvest reaching consumers via a direct subscription model that protected yields during the transition and built a market for the produce in the same season.

iv. Paddy planting — putting eight hectares back under cultivation

Securing support for a tractor, mechanical paddy transplanter and other equipment that brought more than eight hectares of khazan land back into active paddy cultivation — primarily under the high-yielding Jyoti variety, with a smaller dedicated area for the heritage salt-tolerant Korgut.

v. Operations — storage, processing, packaging, distribution

The unglamorous backbone: a working setup for cleaning, processing, storing and packaging produce, plus a delivery van and a computer system to run it on — supported by NABARD Goa through Central Bank of India, and anchored in the Club's own office in Chodan, the first dedicated farmers'-club office in the state.

What seven years of patient work produced.

Each thread reinforced the others. The brand and packaging work on Chorao Red Kernel Rice opened supermarket shelves; the mango grading process and direct-sales channels in eleven Goan neighbourhoods — extended to Mumbai test markets and corporate gifting — established that Chorao produce could command a premium without an intermediary. The organic vegetable subscriptions built a habit of direct buying among Goan households. The tractor and transplanter brought eight hectares of khazan back into production. And the operational backbone — storage, processing, packaging, the delivery van and the computer setup — meant the Club could actually run all of this as a working enterprise rather than a series of disconnected pilots.

Recognition followed. In 2009–10, NABARD recognised the Chorao-Madel Farmers' Club as the best-performing of 43 farmers' clubs in Goa. In February 2010, Club President Premanand Mahambare was honoured at Vigyan Bhavan in Delhi, among 101 small & marginal farmers featured in the Ministry of Agriculture's Harvest of Hope, and felicitated by the Union Minister for Agriculture. By 2014, when the GIZ–Goa Forest Department Coastal & Marine Protected Area project chose Chorao as its Goa site, the Club was specifically named as one of the people-led sustainable initiatives that made the island the right choice.

Who did what.

Programme lead — Yogita Mehra. Programme lead at TERI's Western Regional Centre. Oversaw agronomy, the organic transition pilot, mechanisation, marketing strategy and farmer engagement across the seven-year engagement.

Marketing & communications — Karan Manral. Marketing and communications support, including authorship of programme communications and the announcement and field-note posts on the Club's blog.

Partners on the ground — the Club's members. Premanand Mahambare (founding President), Mukund Khandeparkar (cashew enterprise), Jaganath Pai (mango grower), and over a hundred member-farmers across Chodan and Madel.

Funding & institutional support. The work was made possible by funding and institutional support from The Energy & Resources Institute (TERI), The Toyota Foundation (Japan), and NABARD Goa — the latter routed via Central Bank of India for the operational setup.

In the press & archive.

The contemporary record of the programme — written as part of the communications work — lives on the Club's WordPress blog, with selected coverage and a photographic archive elsewhere.

• The Chorao-Madel Farmers' Club blog (2009–2014) — primary record: announcements, mango seasons, study trips and field notes
• The Better India — How These Goans Decided to Go Organic
• Herald Goa · Café — Interpreting Mangroves at Chorao (CMPA project context)
• India Water Portal — Saving Chorao through its People
• Flickr archive — Chorao Island Farmers Club photographic archive (445 images)

Implemented by TERI · Funded by the Toyota Foundation · With operational support from NABARD Goa & Central Bank of India.