Early Lessons from the CoRE Stack Pilots
Published: July 2025
How can digital tools strengthen local planning and ensure that the voices of rural communities shape their village NRM priorities? That’s the question we set out to explore through early pilots of the Commons Connect application, part of the larger CoRE Stack ecosystem, in collaboration with three grassroots organizations: Gram Vaani in Uttar Pradesh, SUPPORT in Jharkhand, and FES in Odisha.
At the heart of the process are trained landscape stewards and volunteers who work with communities to map resources, identify needs, and generate Detailed Project Reports (DPRs) that feed into Gram Sabha and Panchayat planning processes. What we’re seeing is a planning process that is inclusive, data-driven, and bottom-up.
Across 20 villages, over 180 demands have been articulated and 100 already approved, ranging from farm ponds and irrigation wells to women-led kitchen gardens and fisheries. In each state, the process adapted to different institutional landscapes like leveraging Gram Sabhas in Jharkhand, volunteer-led mobilization in Uttar Pradesh, and ecological data integration in Odisha.
The landscape stewards - young people, women, resource persons - are the key actors. They build plans, facilitate community discussions, and help navigate paperwork and government systems. They are the glue holding the planning process together.
Explore the full report here
As this work evolves, it raises important questions:
- How do we sustain and deepen the role of local landscape stewards?
- Which demands get accepted or filtered out, and why?
- Are communities beginning to reclaim power in the planning process?
We’re starting to see hopeful signs: people holding their “demand paper” and saying, “Now we can follow up.” This is clearly not just documentation, it is ownership and a shift in power dynamics.
Stay tuned as we continue to learn, adapt, and walk alongside communities in building a more responsive, just, and participatory model of rural development.
#LocalPlanning #NRM #CoREStack #DigitalGovernance #CommunityLedDevelopment