CSR - Afforestation Programme by ITC Limited.

ITC's afforestation mission goes beyond regenerating wastelands and forests. It enhances farm incomes and generates sustainable employment. ITC’s afforestation project is driven by the realisation that India’s poor forest cover – a meagre 11%, with 40% crown density of the geographical area of the country against a desirable 33% – has serious implications for the rural poor. Forests and common property resources constitute as much as 20% or more of the total income source of such households. ITC has effectively leveraged its need for wood fibre to provide significant opportunities to economically backward wasteland owners. The main plank of ITC’s forestry projects is the building of grassroots capacities to initiate a virtuous cycle of sustainable development.

In 2007-08, under the ITC's afforestation programme, 52 million saplings have been planted covering an area of over 15000 hectares. In a span 15 years, nearly 332 million saplings have been planted in over 80,000 hectares, generating employment potential for over 8,00,000 people. By 2009-10, 100 million saplings will be planted over 100,000 hectares of private wastelands, benefiting 1.2 million people.

ITC, working with select NGOs, identifies poor tribals with wastelands and organises them into self-supporting forest user groups. The user group leaders are trained by ITC to follow best silvicultural practices to grow high quality timber as a viable cash crop, and other local species that meet domestic, fodder, fuel and nutrition requirements.
 
ITC provides a comprehensive package of support and extension services to farmers – loans, land development, planting of saplings, plantation maintenance, marketing and funds management. Helping the farmer produce a quality that attracts the best price. After the first harvest, the farmer returns the loan to his forest resource user group, in the process, creating a village development fund large enough to sponsor aspiring timber growers. Or meet other village development needs. Making sustainability a reality.

ITC also makes available high-yielding, disease free clonal planting stock developed through Tree Improvement research at its Bhadrachalam unit. The commercial viability of these clones is evident from the fact that farmers have brought over 80,000 hectares under such plantations. Additionally more than 60,000 hectares have been planted by the forest departments of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and West Bengal.

At the heart of this comprehensive greening project is ITC’s state-of-art research centre, consistently striving for productivity improvement of several tree species in order to give attractive land-use alternatives to traditional farmers and wasteland owners. So far 107 high-yielding, fast-growing and disease-resistant ‘Bhadrachalam’ clones of Eucalyptus and 12 clones of Subabul have been produced on a commercial scale with productivity more than thrice that of the normal seedlings. Included in these are 23 site-specific clones adapted to problematic alkaline and saline soils. In the pipeline are research projects on casuarina, rain-fed bamboo and other sustainable agro-forestry models.

These strategic initiatives will, on one hand, make procurement of industrial timber exclusively from sustainable sources a reality within next few years and on the other hand, benefit 1.2 million people through incremental employment. Additionally, it helps forest conservation by reducing pressure on public forests. Apart from the obvious benefits of increasing the forest cover, this effort also directly contributes to in-situ moisture conservation, groundwater recharge and significant reduction in top-soil losses due to wind and water erosion. With poor households having access to their own woody biomass under ITC’s social forestry programme, they can meet most of their fuelwood requirements in-house through loppings and toppings, thus further reducing pressure on public forests. As a result of the leaf-litter from multi-species plantations and the promotion of leguminous inter-crops, depleted soils are constantly enriched. Soon this will lead to a decline in fertiliser and pesticide consumption, thus reducing the pollution of groundwater sources by such chemicals.

ITC has created an attractive income opportunity for farmers to grow high-yielding, disease-resistant clonal saplings into plantations.