A gardener and a domestic worker who left their village in Chittoor years ago to make ends meet in the city have now returned home. Several more families are expected to follow by December.

The reason is not sentiment, it is sustained income.

“They’re just closing up their obligations in the city and will come back,” says Sunder Raju, founder of Project Chittoor, a CSR initiative of the Atria Group in Andhra Pradesh that is trying to solve a problem that has long plagued Indian agriculture: how to make tiny, fragmented and mostly barren landholdings economically viable.

The project began after Raju visited his ancestral village about eighteen months ago to start off the Kumb Festival there. He returned to a vacant street with pucca houses whose residents had migrated to cities in hope of a better future. Most families still owned land, but holdings had shrunk across generations to one or two acres at most. The plots were typically leased out for a seasonal crop when the rains arrived and lay largely unused for the rest of the year. Drawing inspiration from an agroforest created by his nephew, Raju began doing the same across what would eventually become 600 acres of land.

“No individual farmer could really make the investment required,” says Raju.

His solution was to aggregate land without changing ownership.

Through a community development trust, farmers contribute their land for development while retaining title. In return, they commit to remaining within the project for at least seven years, allowing investments to be recovered. The trust also defines revenue distribution among farmers, which depends on two factors: the size of land owned and contribution in terms of work hours. Technology allocates daily tasks, assigning work to each farmer. There are 11 different activities, starting with fencing and trenching.

The idea quickly gained traction.

What began with discussions around 50-60 acres grew to more than 160 acres within months. Once work started on the ground, interest accelerated. Today, the trust has signed up over 700 acres, while another 3,400 acres are waiting to be brought into the model, according to Raju.

The economics depend on scale.

Early redevelopment costs ran as high as ₹7-8 lakh per acre as the team experimented with different approaches. Those costs have since fallen to ₹2.5-3 lakh per acre, with a target of bringing them down further to around ₹2 lakh.

Project Chittoor’s model rests on three revenue streams: agriculture, livestock and solar power. The land is organised into 30-acre blocks. Each block combines fruit and vegetable cultivation, timber plantations, animal husbandry and solar generation. Around 25 acres are allocated to crops and timber species such as red teak and mahogany, while livestock and solar provide earlier and more predictable cash flows. The 25 acres of agricultural land use agrivoltaics, wherein solar plants are raised above the ground and crops are planted below them, generating 300-400 kWh per subunit. As of now, 22 different crops, 8 different fruits and 4 different trees are being grown across the 600 acres.

“The first revenue has come from animal husbandry,” says Raju.

Each 30-acre unit is designed to support roughly 200 sheep and 20 cows. Poultry was considered but eventually dropped because of its high maintenance requirements. By the time the crops were planted, the animal unit had started to generate income, with a cow producing around 6-7 litres on average.

The solar component serves a different purpose: reducing dependence on rainfall. “Every two or three years there’s a very bad year of rain,” says Raju. “If you have a bad year of agriculture, you have a great year of solar generation.”

The project is designed around roughly 10 kilowatts of solar capacity per acre, creating an alternative income stream when farm output suffers.

According to Raju, the model is already generating between ₹1.5 lakh and ₹2 lakh in daily revenue across the 600-acre area developed so far. His original commitment was to deliver returns of ₹30,000 per acre annually within three years.

The numbers are already tracking higher.

“We are north of ₹60,000 per acre in the one year that we started work in the area we’ve developed,” he says.

The longer-term target is more ambitious.

“My own hope is that every villager who has one acre, net in hand that they can put into the bank at the end of the year, is over a lakh of rupees.”

The model has also been built with an eye on the different stages of a farmer’s life. Before crops are harvested, the animal husbandry unit brings in revenue. Later, during important turning points—a child’s higher education or marriage—farmers can draw on the value of timber species such as mahogany and ebony that have matured over the years. Raju believes this creates an alternative that could eventually eliminate the traditional borrower-lender relationship that has long trapped rural households.

Alongside the farming model, Raju has focused on education in the area. He adopted a government school and gave students tablets to learn and be tested on. Test results are assessed by the Atria team, while teachers act as mentors and help guide students where needed.

The project’s ambitions extend beyond a single village. Raju expects work on 6,000 acres to be completed by the end of the year and is targeting 60,000 acres by 2028. The operating model is being codified into a mobile-based system that guides farmers through everything from fencing and irrigation to subsidy applications and land management.

Interest is already spreading. After delivering 70,000 red teak saplings to the project, truckers from Chhattisgarh returned with local leaders to see it for themselves. Neighbouring districts in Andhra Pradesh have since approached the team with commitments running into thousands of acres. Different government departments and institutions have shown active interest in replicating the model.

For Raju, the project’s significance lies less in farming than in economics.

“We think we’ve cracked the model,” he says.

Whether it can scale remains an open question. But Project Chittoor is attempting something that Indian agriculture has struggled with for decades: turning small, fragmented landholdings into an asset capable of generating stable and diversified income.

The writers are 2026 batch Business Standard-Rahul Khullar interns