Who we are ?
Nature Conservation Society (NCS) is one of the oldest NGOs in its space in India. It was founded in 1976 by a group of forest officials, educationalists and other like-minded people for helping the then newly-formed Palamau Tiger Reserve, Jharkhand to help reduce animal poaching, as well as harmonizing the interests of forest-dwelling tribes and the government’s intent for ecological preservation.
From this theme of “Sustainable ecological development” for a single geographical location (the state of Jharkhand), the society has expanded its activities into various other areas including Biodiversity conservation, Watershed management, Natural Resource management, Environmental awareness and Tribal upliftment, with activities spread across neighboring states (Bihar, Orissa) as well a pan-India consulting practice for some of the above tasks. One of its important diversifications has been into supporting the Bio-fuel movement due to the abundant opportunities it provides for using fallow land in Jharkhand- it is now a leading supplier of subsidized Jatropha (“Bio-diesel plant”) saplings for interested farmers though a large plant nursery it runs .
Who do we help?
NCS has diversified its activities in these years to include programmes to empower women, youths, local communities and man-made impact on biodiversity and natural resources, but the basic objective continues helping Project Tiger be successful.
Scope of the project
- Formation of co-operative of the villagers engaged in cultivating, distillation and sale of the end produce (lemongrass oil and by-products)
- Lemon grass cultivation (in progress)
- Installation of a lemon grass oil distillation unit- I am enabling this through crowd funding
- Research and evaluating different types of distillation units to enable the first batch of oil extraction keeping in mind environmental impact and cost limitations
- Installation of the distillation unit on site
- Arranging buyers for the oil and by-products