Desert Resource Centre
To know > before we act > before we change
Vision – Celebrating the desert land, life, living – its innate potential.
Mission – Through knowledge, resources, partnerships and technologies – constantly working with desert land, life and living – facilitating a sustainable, environment positive and inspiring change.
We’re working on enhancing and greening the value chains, promoting micro-entrepreneurship, supporting innovations and enabling finance for the same. Through grassroot efforts and an open source approach, we inspire and facilitate a cadre of passionate changemakers to approach livelihood opportunities and linked critical environmental & social actions innovatively. Our major focus is on working with youth, artisans, pastoralists and farmers of desert – the subgroups regularly been marginalized and ignored. We aim at promoting micro-entrepreneurship for a robust social enterprise ecosystem. What would be a sustainable desert agro-ecology based livelihood model; or, how a textile enterprise in deserts has to be specially designed and evolved; or, could a digital education model be evolved into a sustainable service based livelihood? These are some of the many questions we keep asking ourselves every day and work towards these goals.
Desert Resource Centre (DRC) is a participatory initiative to explore and advance the knowledge systems embedded in desert culture, ecology and economy, and aggregate the learnings to resolve multiple land, life and living issues therein.
DRC has arisen out of a need for a knowledge interface and action platform for policy advocacy and administering strategies for needs of desert communities – one that enables the wider world to delve into the fantastic wisdom and possibilities of deserts, both hot and cold.
On one hand, we help experts locate key information that could help address and resolve desert-related issues, and on the other, we help desert communities recognise their strengths, build their capacities and harness both.
“A story set in friendship, dignity and change”
Land, Life, Living
its innate potential
Our approach towards addressing the issue of bridging the info-resource gap, is through knowledge platforming, fostering a line of democratic knowledge leadership and re-calibrating existing platforms with the needs of emerging dynamics in the desert.
Our Actions
DRC adopts an open-source approach to inspire and facilitate a cadre of passionate changemakers, who home in on critical environmental and social action in desert regions – and do so with fuss-free innovation. As goes our tagline, our work focuses on 4 key streams of KNOWLEDGE, PARTNERSHIPS, TECHNOLOGY AND RESOURCES. The organisation works through four cores for enhancing a concentrated omnidirectional impact.
Our Focus
Through grassroots efforts and an open source approach, we are evolving from a collective to a community.
- Synthesise desert centric knowledge
- Promote sustainable and clean energy enabled enterprises
- Design forward looking impact solutions and services
- Facilitate critical environmental and social action with innovation
- Reviving ecosystems and fostering conservation
At DRC, our engagement with the desert people has made us aware that a one-size-fits-all template (of what is commonly understood as markers of ‘21st century progress’) may not be received well—or even be relevant—in desert lands.
Appointed technical agency of the Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises, Government of India, DRC has been working on the following themes
Our Work In Action
Agro-Ecology
Pastoralism
Crafts
Education
Sustainability
The Desert Context
Today, deserts everywhere are teeming with similar challenges and opportunities that call for urgent responses. These responses should be shaped by a consummate understanding of the desert value system; should connect insular desert communities to the advantages of the evolving socio-political and technological spaces; and should be fertile with a generous exchange of know-how between different desert regions/communities around the world. However, such responses can only steer effective change when they are invested with a multiplicity of ideas and actions that work at the micro and macro levels to nurture desert ecology, culture and economy.
Desert Innovation Fund
To support innovation and entrepreneurship in the desert communities, DRC has launched the Desert Innovation Fund. It’s a strategic desert ecosystem development plan wherein we work towards the identification, innovation, capacity building, convergence and upscaling of small desert based enterprises.
The premise is based on the convergence and partnerships with organisations and programmes with the common goal of setting up entrepreneurial initiatives and promoting entrepreneurship in the desert with focus on sustainability.
