Areas of Work

Renewable Energy

Further & Beyond Foundation started The Batti Project in 2012 as an initiative to provide basic lighting to remote tribal villages in Northeast India. As a part of this project, the Foundation has worked with renewable energy in different forms. Our approach was always demand-driven: we responded when communities approached us for help, and we facilitated solutions keeping in mind feasibility and sustainability. We began with providing basic solar-powered systems to individual homes, and eventually built a picohydel system that provides 24/7 power to a school and a few houses in a village. Following our ethos of responding to organic demand, we lit up more than 40 villages at a gentle pace. While we are not actively implementing any renewable energy projects at this time, we remain ready to support communities that face critical needs in this regard. Our mission remains the same— to provide sustainable, ecologically sound energy solutions where they are most needed.

Waste Management

Further & Beyond Foundation has worked in the area of waste management, including e-waste management, with both communities and organisations in different kinds of settings, including remote tribal villages in Northeast India and major cosmopolitan cities. The Foundation set up Wastecraft in 2017 as a Bengaluru-based venture to upcycle e-waste to raise funds in an innovative way for The Batti Project. It also spread awareness about e-waste and its hazards. A key feature of the project was that it provided pickup from individual households without any minimum requirement. After handling 75+ tonnes of e-waste, the project was closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our journey in waste management in Northeast India started with the realization that there is no word for ‘waste’ in many of the local languages, which led us to wonder how local communities viewed this subject. Initially, we conducted a waste characterization study in Roing, a small district capital, which opened our eyes not only to the lack of waste management in the region but also to the fact that engaging with subject would have a substantial implication: we were proactively responding rather than superficially reacting to an issue that—although rampant in heavily urbanised areas in other parts of India—had not become entrenched in these remote settlements. This meant that we would be creating waste-aware mindsets from scratch for people in the entire region rather than challenging or changing established mindsets. This needed not only designing and implementing systems and processes, but would in fact involve shaping the culture around waste. We continued our journey in the form of further engagements and waste management drives, and eventually another project, the Northeast Waste Collective took shape in 2018 as a platform to address waste management issues in Northeast India. It makes communities become waste aware, and also helps them manage their waste safely. Northeast Waste Collective was started by the Foundation from ideas rooted in Wastecraft. It currently operates under a different leadership. One more venture in this area pioneered by the Foundation called the Himalayan Fringes Project started in 2023. It envisions an empowered local community that facilitates an ecologically balanced and waste-free future in the Himalayas. To this effect, the project builds community-led waste management models, develops logistics networks to support waste collection and segregation, and encourages communities to mitigate waste in their surroundings through awareness and collaboration.

Capacity Building

Further & Beyond Foundation has helped build capacity in the communities and for the people it has worked with, leading to long-term benefits. Our journey in capacity building began as an extension of our renewable energy initiatives. Designed as a charity challenge with the primary goal of raising funds for The Batti Project, Ride To Light was Northeast India’s first full-fledged cycle tour and it may be viewed as a flagship capacity building project of the Foundation. Started in 2016, it spanned 300+ kilometres through Arunachal Pradesh, and hosted more than 40 riders in 3 iterations. Directorate of Sports and Youth Affairs, Government of Arunachal Pradesh was an official partner for Ride To Light, and the project had a significant capacity building impact— Communities were trained in hospitality, tourism management, and logistics to handle visitors. Over time, our capacity-building efforts extended beyond hospitality to include preservation of local culture, heritage, and ecology, and promotion of traditional skills as a means of creating sustainable incomes. Local people who were a part of the Ride To Light team, including the famous mountaineer Tine Mena, used this experience to set up travel and tourism companies like Dibang Adventure and Mishmi Hills Trekking Company. Two leading cyclists of Arunachal Pradesh—Rubi Lombo and Ahonda Menjo—were inspired for the journeys from their experiences with Ride To Light. Ride To Light was paused in 2019 and eventually closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, our ongoing effort at capacity building through a number of other engagements, including the Himalayan Fringes Project, reflects our belief in empowering communities to be the architects of their own progress.