Hyderabad, Nov 2nd: The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), will reduce poverty in dry lands through the recently-launched Village Dynamics Studies (VDS) project which aims at informing smallholder farmers about programs and policies to help lift themselves out of hunger and poverty. Seeking to improve the quantity and quality of village-based information for better decision-making, the five-year project will be implemented by ICRISAT together with National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research (NCAP) in the humid tropics of East India.

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) will implement it in Bangladesh in collaboration with Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) and SocioConsult (BRAC). In a statement, ICRISAT’s Director General William Dar said the purpose of this unique project is to decrease the incidence and severity of absolute poverty by markedly increasing the availability of time-series data at the district, household and individual levels. Dr Dar also emphasized that tracking poverty by using the data to be collected by this project will further inform and advance policy dialogue for the dry lands. According to Dr MCS Bantilan, the Principal Scientist of the project, this multi-disciplinary study builds on the unique databases already developed by ICRISAT and will add considerable value to them.