Ashoka Iron Group’s CSR arm anchors a working model for community-led nature recovery in Belagavi
BELAGAVI / BENGALURU, May 17— A year after the Jaybharat Foundation, the CSR arm of the Ashoka Iron Group, Belagavi, committed itself to Harit Ekam — a community-anchored conservation programme on the forest fringe of the Bhimgad Wildlife Sanctuary — camera traps, pugmark surveys and shed-skin evidence have together confirmed what conservationists across the Western Ghats had quietly hoped for: a degraded meadow at Hemmadga Beat (Survey No. 129), near Abnale Village in Khanapur Taluk, is once again carrying apex species. Tiger, gaur, sloth bear, and the king cobra have all been documented at the site within the past twelve months.
For Jaybharat Foundation, which owns the programme and its impact, Harit Ekam represents the steel sector’s most visible entry into measurable, evidence-led conservation in the Belagavi landscape. The Kanak Krishna Srivastava Social Welfare Trust (KKSSWT) is delivering the programme on the ground as the Foundation’s implementation partner, having authored and now operating the Wildlife Meadow Management Plan that governs the site.
Crucially, what makes Harit Ekam more than a conventional CSR engagement is that the citizens of Belagavi have joined hands with the anchor CSR partner. While the Jaybharat Foundation funds and owns the two-acre core of the 2.29-acre site, the remaining 0.29 acres — roughly 1,173 Forest Restoration Units (one FRU = one square metre) — has been purchased, one FRU at a time, by individual citizens and community members at a contribution rate of ₹625 per FRU. Together, these citizen FRUs represent close to ₹7.33 lakh of voluntary community capital placed directly into the forest, demonstrating a level of community urge, ownership and participation that few conservation programmes in India have managed to evidence. Community and citizenry standing alongside an anchor CSR partner, FRU by FRU, is the working model Harit Ekam set out to prove — and the apex species have responded.
“This is Belagavi’s forest, and Belagavi industry must answer for it”
Mr. Jayant Ashok Humbarwadi, President of Jaybharat Foundation, said the decision to launch and own Harit Ekam was rooted in a sense of regional accountability.
“Bhimgad is Belagavi’s forest. The communities around Khanapur are Belagavi’s communities. If the Ashoka Iron Group draws its strength from this land, then its foundation must answer for the health of this land. Harit Ekam is that answer. We did not want a token plantation drive that disappears in two monsoons — we wanted a programme that brings the tiger back, that brings the gaur back, and that puts the village of Abnale at the centre of the recovery. Within twelve months we have evidence of all three. That is the impact Jaybharat Foundation set out to create, and that is the impact we now stand behind.”
He added that the Foundation intends to scale Harit Ekam beyond the Hemmadga pilot in the coming financial year, with a clear preference for sites that demonstrate the same combination of habitat potential and community readiness.
“Our commitment is not to a single meadow. It is to a model — one where industry, community, and forest sit at the same table, and where outcomes are reported in pugmarks and plot data, not in press releases.”
“Apex species return when the community is ready”
Shivani Sinha, Principal Program Officer, speaking for the implementation team at KKSSWT, said the programme’s most underreported gain has been social, not biological.
“Apex species do not return to a landscape where the human community is hostile to the forest. Every metre of meadow recovery at Hemmadga is matched by a conversation, a livelihood, a school visit, a grievance heard. The reason we are seeing tiger movement and a confirmed king cobra shed in the same compartment is that Abnale has stopped seeing the forest as a boundary and started seeing it as a balance sheet they have a stake in. Jaybharat Foundation gave us the runway to do that work seriously, and KKSSWT’s role is simply to deliver it cleanly on the ground.”
She added that the Forest Restoration Unit (FRU) model — small, costed, monitored units of restoration delivered through community institutions — was now mature enough for replication once the Foundation expands the programme footprint.
“Impact must belong to the funder, evidence must belong to the public”
Vaanchhita Raj, Principal Program Officer and Deputy Managing Trustee of KKSSWT, framed the implementation partnership in unusually direct terms.
“We are very clear about our role. The impact of Harit Ekam belongs to Jaybharat Foundation — they own it, they fund it, they answer for it. KKSSWT’s responsibility is to ensure that the evidence belongs to the public — every transect, every camera-trap image, every plot-level recovery number is documented, audited, and made available. That is the discipline this programme is built on. When Mr. Humbarwadi says the tiger is back, he should be able to point to the data, and the data should point back to the community that made it possible.”
She confirmed that Harit Ekam is now KKSSWT’s flagship implementation engagement, and that the Trust is preparing a third-party ecological audit of the Hemmadga compartment as part of the next reporting cycle.
What comes next
According to programme staff, the next twelve months will focus on three deliverables on behalf of Jaybharat Foundation: a third-party ecological audit of the Hemmadga compartment, expansion to additional sites within the Belagavi landscape, and the launch of a geospatial dashboard that will make Harit Ekam one of the first CSR-funded conservation programmes in India to publish open, plot-level recovery data.
For a meadow that was, twelve months ago, simply another fragment of degraded forest edge, the headline of the year is now considerably larger. As one field officer put it during a recent transect walk: “The animals voted with their paws.”
— Special Report