International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, said that “India is in its villages”. “If villages perish, India perishes”. Gandhi ji had a vision of self-reliant villages; now we call it green villages. Green village is the village which practices sustainable development in terms of pleasant environment, effective and efficient planning, energy conservation, biodiversity, rain water harvesting, water management, animal husbandry, pesticide and fertilizer free cultivation techniques.“Khonoma” is one such village of India, which has been declared as India‟s first green village by Government of Nagaland and Government of India. This has been made possible by the joint efforts of indigenous habitants of Khonoma, Government of Nagaland and Govt. of India through launching the „Green Village project‟ of INR 30 million in 2005. The tribes of Nagaland are born warriors, who used to play head hunting as game and it is said that, they may eat anything that can move. But to make the “Khonama” village, a green, self-reliant and sustainable village; the villagers stopped hunting animals and cutting off the trees. They are practicing Jhoom cultivation, terraced farming, forest conservation, bamboo handicrafts and more. They are following and fully utilizing the govt. initiatives and fund allocated for different schemes like „Swachh Baharat Abhiyan‟, „MNGREGA‟ and others. Along with this, the village is also preserving its inherent culture, heritage and tradition. This paper will discuss about the practices used in Khonoma, which leads it to become the first green village out of approximately 7,00,000 villages in India.

Index Terms—Green village, Jhoom cultivation, community forest, banned hunting, green construction technology, Swachha Bharat Abhiyan.

The authors are with, BMS School of Architecture, Yelahanka, Bengaluru, India (e-mail: sapna_papu@yahoo.co.in, nishantnathani@gmail.com).

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Cite: Sapna Papu and Nishant Nathani, "India's First Green Village — 'Khonoma'," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 21-25, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).