This impact story is part of a series featuring India Landscape Accelerator (ILA) member companies and their efforts to scale Climate-Smart agriculture (CSA) in Indian landscapes. The series highlights existing company-led initiatives, lessons for implementation, and opportunities for ILA to accelerate collective action.
For Godrej Agrovet, water security is a prerequisite for resilient agriculture. In water-stressed regions of India, the company is restoring watersheds to improve groundwater recharge and strengthen the conditions in which smallholder farmers can manage climate risk, sustain productivity and adopt regenerative practices. Through the India Landscape Accelerator (ILA), it is working to connect these landscape gains with measurable farm-level outcomes.
Building resilience through water stewardship
Godrej Agrovet’s sustainability strategy is built around four pillars: climate change, supply chains, sustainability leadership and responsible products. While these pillars collectively guide the company’s efforts to reduce environmental impacts and strengthen long-term business resilience, its engagement with ILA sits most closely within its work on responsible and regenerative value chains. Under this pillar, the company is developing a regenerative agriculture framework and implementation roadmap, while also undertaking biodiversity and climate risk assessments across key agricultural commodities.
At the heart of this work lies a conviction that water security is fundamental to agricultural resilience.
Our primary geography-level priority is improving groundwater levels in water-stressed agricultural regions, which we treat as a prerequisite for smallholder resilience and climate adaptation.
– Vinay Yelleti, Head of Sustainability
For Godrej, groundwater restoration is not viewed as a standalone environmental objective. Rather, it is seen as an enabler of broader agricultural and social outcomes. Reliable access to water creates conditions for farmers to manage climate risks, maintain productivity, invest in their land and over time adopt more regenerative farming practices. This approach is informing the company’s landscape interventions and its expansion of active watershed programs in Nashik, Maharashtra, and Eluru, Andhra Pradesh, where water resilience is increasingly being integrated into wider efforts to strengthen agricultural systems, including livestock value chains.
Beyond its own programs, Godrej advances agricultural sustainability through collaborative initiatives, including the Resilient Dairy Alliance, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to support responsible palm oil certification in Andhra Pradesh and Northeast India, and the India Sustainable Palm Oil Coalition, where it helps adapt sustainability standards to Indian production contexts.
Watershed restoration and farmer resilience in Barwani and Magadi
Godrej Agrovet’s work in Barwani, Madhya Pradesh, and Magadi, Karnataka, offers a glimpse into how landscape restoration can support agricultural resilience. Working with local implementation partners, the company has focused on watershed management and land restoration efforts designed to improve groundwater recharge and strengthen the natural resources that farming communities depend on.
Over the years, these initiatives have helped rehabilitate approximately 5,900 hectares of degraded land and reach around 3,700 households. According to the company’s estimates, the interventions have the potential to recharge nearly 29.6 million cubic meters of groundwater every year. Since 2016, the programs have also supported the planting and maintenance of around 400,000 native saplings, with an estimated carbon sequestration potential of almost 29,750 tonnes of CO₂ over time.
Godrej Agrovet can already measure the environmental results of its watershed work: restored land, groundwater recharge and tree planting. Its next challenge is to show how these improvements influence farmer decisions, livelihoods and the uptake of regenerative practices. Rather than overclaiming, the company sees this evidence gap as the next frontier for action.
Learning, measuring and accelerating impact
For Godrej Agrovet, ILA is less about showcasing success and more about solving challenges together.
The company sees two key opportunities:
- Improving measurement: better tools and indicators could help connect landscape restoration outcomes with wider benefits for farmers, including resilience and regenerative farming adoption.
- Learning from peers: through ILA, Godrej Agrovet is exchanging experiences with other companies navigating similar questions around regenerative agriculture, Scope 3 emissions and landscape-level impact.
Godrej Agrovet’s journey highlights an important lesson: restoring landscapes is not only about repairing natural resources, but also about understanding how those environmental improvements translate into meaningful outcomes for farmers. Through ILA, Godrej Agrovet aims to develop practical, India-specific measures that connect watershed restoration with farmer resilience and regenerative-practice adoption.
Outline
