Sameer, a Hub and Spoke model maybe a good ploy. Let me explain this.
A good bare minimum to have a long term demonstration model is usually 300-500 acres. This could incorporate several livelihoods and socio economic strata to live, learn, earn livelihood from. Let us reduce these 300 acres to 100 acres for “capital sake”. Ideally 300 acres would make sense if this was completely degraded land, with cheap labour around (₹200/ day for a 7 hour work day), and if we wanted to work on top down approach. Top down approaches would make a centre of excellence out of this patch but the pressure to trickle the work over to other “spikes” from this “hub” would create unrest.
So let us say we took 70-100 acres land and tried to do 5 things there - natural resource management (water, soil, bio diversity), community working and living, food forests (long term play), cow rearing (think manure and butter milk for all), and organic farming, and allow this to happen organically for the investors as a slow burn, then a large chunk of this effort could go in building relationships with local panchayats etc.
This model should be good but the problem of having community less options is that the islands of excellence never reach out a lot, albeit Timbaktu is exceptional and Babloo is one in a million gem material.
Hence, starting with a few key “locations”, with a few “influential” local farmers, with “authentic” relationships could be the key.
It should be clear if we intend to give back to investors in 10 years or are really setting a resource rich way to tackle so many ills around us.
Like my advisor would tell me - what is the problem statement ?
Thank you.