Aranya Agricultural Alternatives

Aranya Agricultural Alternatives is an environmental and development non-profit founded in Hyderabad in March 1999 by Narsanna and Padma Koppula. Its name comes from the Sanskrit aranya, meaning forest, and the organisation takes the forest as its working model: a self-sustaining, energy-generating system in which all life forms coexist. Its purpose is to offer a practical alternative to conventional chemical agriculture, and it works today across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

Narsanna Koppula was introduced to permaculture while working at the Deccan Development Society and took part in the first Permaculture Design Course held in India, in 1987, taught by Bill Mollison and Robyn Francis. The organisation he and Padma went on to found concentrates on the farmers with the least room for risk: small, marginal and tribal households, and the women's groups within them. The work covers soil regeneration, water conservation, seed saving, food security and secure rural livelihoods, and Aranya reports having reached around 250,000 farmers directly and indirectly across the two states.

Teaching runs through everything. Aranya offers a two-day Introduction to Permaculture and a thirteen-day residential Permaculture Design Course covering the standard seventy-two-hour curriculum, and its staff co-facilitate Permaculture Teacher Training programmes in India. Students, interns and volunteers come from across India and from abroad to learn at the farm at Zaheerabad.

Two demonstration farms anchor the teaching. The Aranya farm at Pastapur village, Zaheerabad, is a dryland food forest of one to three acres showing exactly what a smallholder can grow on that scale: millets and other cereals, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables, fruit and nuts, in rotation. Patashala, established in 2015 at Badangpet on the edge of Hyderabad, is a thousand square metres of urban permaculture that feeds several families and serves as a city learning centre.

In 2017 Aranya hosted the 13th International Permaculture Convergence in India, convened by Narsanna Koppula. The conference ran at Professor Jayashankar Telangana Agricultural University in Hyderabad on 25 and 26 November, followed by the convergence at Polam Farm from 27 November to 2 December, under the theme Towards Healthy Societies, with a particular emphasis on women as agents of change.

Two-day Introduction to Permaculture and thirteen-day residential Permaculture Design Courses, permaculture teacher training, design and implementation support for farmers, demonstration farms at Zaheerabad and Hyderabad, and internships and volunteering.