FOCUS 2.0 (2025): Assessing Climate Resilience and Indigenous Livelihoods in Mizoram (2025–2031)

Policy Update
Ayan Bordoloi

Background

The second generation rural transformation programme, FOCUS 2.0, focuses on a challenging policy question in Mizoram: how to increase the productivity and profitability of upland agriculture without degrading the ecological processes and community institutions upon which rural livelihoods rely? The programme received approval from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in November 2025 and will benefit all 11 districts of Mizoram, 700 villages and 75,000 households (about 150,000 people). It is specifically aimed at Indigenous Peoples in the IFAD project framework, and has specific participation targets for women and youth. Finally, the approved project cost is US$87.45 million, of which the IFAD loan is US$45.78 million.

There is an important date difference in the project. The Project Design Report (PDR) for September 2025 outlines a six-year implementation period from 2025 to 2031, whereas IFAD’s financing announcement in April 2026 indicates that FOCUS 2.0 will be implemented between 2026 and 2032. The latter is the more pertinent operational benchmark because of the signing of the financing agreement. This change isn’t just a change of process, but a change of time; in the event the implementation process falls behind schedule, there is less opportunity for field level learning, institutional maturation and asset utilization before the project’s closing time.

The problem of development in Mizoram is very peculiar and spatial. The state is predominantly tribal (94.4 per cent in 2011 Census) and farming is done in rugged and hilly terrain, which mostly relies on rainfall. Government climate assessments have identified agriculture as highly vulnerable to changes in temperature, precipitation and seasonal variability , the rainfall hazard analysis has shown a strong relationship between heavy rainfall and events like landslides or floods. The risk of production increases, and the costs of all the downstream activities involved in moving inputs, consolidating the harvest, maintaining roads, providing veterinary services and constructing market facilities are also raised.

Shifting cultivation (jhum) is not just a technological option that is able to be superseded by a single better technology. It is a way of life that is deeply rooted in local ecology, labour arrangements, land rights and food security. The ecological issue occurs when the fallow time gets reduced due to population pressure and change in land use and the soil fertility and vegetation regrowth lag behind cultivation.

In the parts of Mizoram where the jhum is practiced, ICAR has identified the reduction of the jhum cycle with time as the challenge, while IFAD has positioned it as a soil fertility problem and erosion issue, as well as a problem of altered climate patterns and increased value production. The important policy question, therefore, is not whether the reduction in jhum is an end in itself, but how production systems can be made economically viable to the households.

Table 1. FOCUS 2.0 at a glance

Source: IFAD Project Design Report (2025), approved President’s Report (2025), and IFAD financing announcement (9 April 2026).

The most impactful attribute of FOCUS 2.0 is that it views climate resiliency as an economic challenge as well as an environmental challenge. A farmer who continues to produce after a big rain event, but can’t find a buyer is not fully resilient; a household that gets a package of high valued crops but has to take all the price risk is not fully resilient; and a market centre that is profitable in a normal monsoon but frequently loses road access during high rainfall events is not resilient infrastructure. The project’s integrated design – production clusters, aggregation, production, finance, digital services, and climate resilient infrastructure – is designed to tackle all these interacting constraints simultaneously.

There is however a second analytical problem: the term “Indigenous livelihoods” does not mean the same as “maintaining all traditional production systems” or “commercializing indigenous production systems”. The IFAD design is clearly focused on Indigenous Peoples as the client and on participatory approaches to planning, community institutions, customary approaches and traditional knowledge. The relevant policy question here is whether households have more access to and have more confidence in the choices they can make for their livelihoods, and have a stronger voice in land use, production priorities and value divided generated by the new markets. This is especially relevant with temporary arrangements of land use and market oriented intensification.

FOCUS 2.0 is thus located at the intersection of four transitions: 1) subsistence to market-oriented production, 2) dispersed household production to clustered production, 3) reactive coping to planned climate adaptation, and 4) project-funded assets to institutionalized state and community systems. The success of its implementation will not only rely on the success of individual technologies, but more importantly on how these transitions complement each other. This is the crux for the rest of this policy update.

Functioning

There are three interrelated parts to FOCUS 2.0. It is designed to be different to a traditional farm input programme as it tries to address the market and infrastructure constraints that can render production gains economically unviable. The PDR outlines a sequence from production level – through village aggregation – block level trading – district level value addition and enterprise development – finance and digital services.

A three-tiered hub-and-spoke is used for the market side of the programme. First, Collective Marketing Centres are designed to concentrate production closer to the production site, and establish a more stable farmgate point of sale. Block-level Farmers’ Markets aim to encourage local wholesale and semi-retail trade at the second level. At the third level, at the district level, Value Addition Hubs are envisaged to offer sorting, grading, packaging, processing and storage services including cold-chain services, based on economic considerations of commodities. The design goal is to lower the transaction costs arising from a dislocated production process and inaccessible terrain and raise the proportion of the market price captured by producers.

This is infrastructure logic applied to rural businesses – the enterprise component. The design suggests incubating, providing business development support and links to financial institutions and private-sector actors, instead of relying heavily on one-off grants. The project also aims to boost the capacity of the Farmer Producer Organizations and Self-Help Groups, enhance digital market access, and utilize financial products, which can assist in working capital, insurance and enterprise investment. From a policy perspective, it’s a paradigm from “farm support” to “rural value chain development”. This is because in Mizoram, many smallholder constraints post production are included, which are aggregation, transport, storage, processing, buyer discovery and payment.

The production side is based on the concept of Zau (spatially defined agricultural intensification clusters). According to PDR, the Zaus are production clusters that range between 15-30 hectares designed to synchronize farmers, inputs, extension, natural-resource management and market linkages. The cluster is not only a geographical term, it is the organizational unit that will allow economies of scale in an environment of small and dispersed plots. The project also contributes to crop diversification, natural farming and low-external-input methods, soil and water conservation, stress-tolerant planting material, irrigation and spring-shed, and land-development works adapted to local conditions.

Livestock is not considered a primary resilience asset. Support covers pigs, poultry and goats with better disease control, biosecurity, veterinary services and marketing. This is important because livestock provide supplement income in times of crop seasonality or failure. However, Phase I evidence demonstrated that livestock support was not fully utilised when compared to potential and animal health support was not always present. The disease control and community-based veterinary services are given more importance in FOCUS 2.0, which addresses this lesson explicitly.

The implementation is based on the Society for Climate Resilient Agriculture in Mizoram (SCRAM), state and district project structures under the Planning and Programme Implementation Department. A key idea is convergence: FOCUS 2.0 should mobilise programmes like MGNREGA, RKVY, PMKSY and rural livestock schemes and not fund each input. 

The knowledge function is also of the same great importance. The PDR requires a Knowledge Action Plan, case studies, technical notes, and documentation and outputs of innovations and failures, especially for gender, youth and traditional knowledge, in conjunction with GIS. This is not a peripheral activity: phase I came up with useful innovations, but a few were adopted in the last two years, which were not enough to allow for systematic learning and scaling-up activities. FOCUS 2.0 is trying to institutionalize learning, rather than it being an end-of-project exercise.

Production clusters generate volume and coordination, market infrastructure generates aggregation and value-add, enterprise and finance functions generate the capacity to invest, climate-smart practices reduce production risk, and convergence and knowledge systems determine the viability of the model after the end of the external financing. If one of the links is weak, then the other links can’t work as effectively.

Performance

Because FOCUS 2.0 is a new six-year phase, there is a distinction between design performance, early implementation performance and measured development impact. As of September 2026, public evidence is strongest for the first two categories. The most useful benchmark is therefore FOCUS Phase I, whose independent completion validation was published in January 2026. That validation is especially valuable because it tests project claims against endline survey evidence and identifies design, implementation and measurement weaknesses that FOCUS 2.0 is supposed to correct.

Figure 1. Selected Phase I endline changes in Mizoram. Income measures are inflation-adjusted; crop figures are reported yield changes. Source: IFAD Independent Office of Evaluation, Project Completion Report Validation (January 2026).

The performance of markets and institutions was more variable

Evaluation shows that 73 per cent of the spice trade target was achieved, 62 per cent of good animal husbandry practice target was achieved, The number of households reporting an increase in production reached 261 per cent of the target and 100 per cent of the increased production expected at the producer organisations. However, linkages with the main stream retail chains, food processors and exporters were still not strong enough, due to low connectivity and the lack of visibility of these actors in the state, which hindered the project’s scaling up of linkages.

Reported physical access to markets: 109,317 households targeted for 162,000, achieved 67 per cent. Some 109,317 households reported improved physical access to markets, processing and storage facilities, against a target of 162,000 (67 per cent achievement). The foreseen alignment to the state schemes for rehabilitation of earthen roads was not realised, and the corresponding output indicator only reached 57 per cent of the target.

This is a key lesson for FOCUS 2.0. The issue is not that infrastructure for markets is missing from the design but rather the need for the roads, buyers, volumes, standards, finance and post-harvest systems to work in concert. When you can’t get to your collection centre by road or there is no buyer demand, you have a stranded asset risk.

On the other hand, the success of a farmer organization in obtaining a buyer who does not guarantee certain amounts or quality may generate some negative issues for the reputation and the contract of the farmer groups. The new hub and spoke architecture is more aptly described as an operating system, which needs to be coordinated in sequencing rather than just a list of construction outputs.

Figure 2. Scale-up in coverage. Phase I figures refer to the operational coverage reported by IFAD/GoM in 2025; Phase II figures are approved targets. Households are shown in thousands. Sources: IFAD/GoM review reporting and FOCUS 2.0 approved project documents.

Figure 3. FOCUS 2.0 financing architecture, US$ million. The financing gap is not committed expenditure; it is a resource-mobilisation requirement identified in the approved project design. Source: IFAD approved President’s Report and project page.

Impact

The “impact question” should be phrased as a pathway, instead of a promise. The impact of FOCUS 2.0 on livelihoods can be expected in four related areas: Production resilience, Market realization, Livelihood diversification and Institutional resilience. The project’s economic analysis is also favourable: the approved design has an estimated 20-year economic IRR of 30.3 per cent and a 12 per cent discounted net present value of US$48.9 million. The design also indicates that the project is economically viable for several of sensitivity scenarios which are modelled conditions not observed conditions.

Managing shocks to climate resilience: from technology adoption to shock absorption

The best potential climate influence is the combination of soil and water conservation, stress-tolerant varieties, water management, integrated farming, diversification and resilient market infrastructure. Climate assessment in Mizoram indicates that the climate is highly dynamic, with either increased heavy rainfall and dry spells in the same agro-ecological system, and hence the need for proper drainage/erosion control and water-security management. FOCUS 2.0 can thus go beyond resilience as a one-off farm practice and embrace resilience as a set of farm adaptations.

The analytic guardedness lies in not equating adoption with resilience. Phase I offers some evidence of the adoption of climate-smart practices, but was not able to prove that households suffered fewer income losses or were able to recover more quickly from a shock due to the project.

The measure of resilience in FOCUS 2.0 should, therefore, reflect resilience directly, including: Variability in yields from season to season; Days lost from production due to climate hazards; Time taken to recover from a production loss due to a climate hazard; Reduction in the reliability of irrigation; Livestock deaths due to disease or weather hazards; Volume of income fluctuations. If these are not in place, the project could report many resilient technologies but not resilient livelihoods.

Indigenous livelihoods: value creation, voice & land security

Because it is an IFAD project, the potential social impact of FOCUS 2.0 is unusually broad, as the project is designed to address 100 per cent Indigenous Peoples. This is important in a State where customary institutions, Village Councils, community organizations and local land arrangements influence access to production. In Phase I it was shown that land-security interventions can have a direct effect: 5,673 households were organized into 274 Farmer Interest Groups and 4,169 households were given access to 3,176 ha of land over 5-10 years. It also highlighted the need for temporary land passes, which can facilitate settled farming of households lacking formal land tenure.

But the assessment of the impact on Indigenous livelihoods must be based on both agency and income. A market-based programme can boost cash income but also raise price risk, price input risk and buyer concentration risk. Can also alter the food/cash crop ratio. This is partly addressed in the PDR by promoting kitchen gardens, diversified crops and shifting of crops from jhum fields to household production with explicit linkages made between productivity and nutrition and agro-biodiversity. The more profound policy demand is that communities have a meaningful choice on what crops to grow, how to allocate the land, and what rules to apply to their local enterprises.

There is a difference between participation and empowerment for women and youth.

FOCUS 2.0 has a 50 per cent women beneficiary target and a 15 per cent youth beneficiary target in the approved Project Framework. This is an important quantitative correction relative to Phase I which had shown the women-headed households to be 23 per cent of those reached and women 19 per cent of total persons reached; the project’s gender-mainstreaming strategy had stalled for lack of an action plan. Women’s participation in household financial decision making also improved in an uneven manner, as determined by the validation.

Therefore, the impact indicators relevant to the project must transcend the mere number of people who attend or are beneficiaries. The project should monitor women’s control of farm income, ownership of productive assets, involvement in enterprise decision making and shifts in unpaid care responsibilities. It should monitor the number of sustainable enterprises established by youth, annual income, and the viability of the enterprises after two years for youth and the percentage of youth involved in or returning to community/local economic development. These measures would examine if the inclusion targets alter livelihood structure or just project composition.

Potential income and regional value-chain impact.

The project also could bring about spillover benefits outside the farm enterprise. In addition to creating rural non-farm jobs through aggregation and processing, more reliable market volumes can attract buyers and logistics services, while more reliable data and digital finance can alleviate information asymmetries. IFAD further anticipates that by project end 40,000 or more rural households will be involved in formal market transactions. The project may result in more organized and stable economic patterns of the rural economy if the target is reached by maintaining the buyers and accepting the bargaining leverage of the producers.

The counter-risk is the concentration of business. High-value spices, fruits and livestock can be made more marketable, but more price sensitive. A climate-resilient livelihood package should include not only increased production, but also improved price intelligence, better buyers, collective bargaining and, where possible, processing to move the farmers away from raw commodities to differentiated products. In the absence of such, greater physical integration could lead to greater price volatility for producers without commensurate leverage.

Emerging Issues

The following problems are now apparent from the Phase I evaluation, Phase II design and the move from the approved to the implemented. They do not provide excuses to abandon the programme – they are simply indicators of where the policy architecture will be most likely to be tested.

1. The risk linked to the implementation of the clock and sequencing. The September 2025 PDR identified the timeframe of public implementation as 2026-2032, whereas the financing agreement signed in April 2026 indicated a public implementation timeframe of 2025-2031. The practical danger is “practical risk” – i.e. heavy cost pressure at the back-end, after the initial cost pressure is taken up by compressing learning at the front-end, just as occurred in Phase I, when nearly 80 per cent of the costs were incurred in the final three years. It is therefore essential to focus on readiness, deployment of staff, procurement systems, baseline data and market feasibility from an early stage – not on the maximisation of physical expenditure.

2. The financing shortfalls and convergence are not incidental features, they are structural. The approved financing plan results in a $11.21 million financing gap, which will be covered stage-wise using state funding, centrally and state-sponsored schemes, domestic institutions and future financing. Another area highlighted during Phase I was that expected convergence with road programmes did not materialise as planned. Convergence must be considered as a contractual and operational workstream that has a clear owner, quarterly milestones and contingency financing and is not a reflection of the project logframe.

3. Implementation capacity may not catch up to scale. The managerial problem changed because the number of villages reported increased from six districts to all 11 districts in the first phase and 272 to 700 villages in the second phase. Coordinate village councils, producer groups, line departments, procurement and climate-risk information and market actors in challenging terrain with district teams. Staff recruitment was delayed and there was high staff turnover and low absorptive capacity in Phase I. Making district-level operating capacity an administrative afterthought can lead to a new programme with a better architecture but that produces old bottlenecks.

4. Indigenous land and livelihood institutions should not be in conflict with commercialisation. The project learned from Phase I that a key enabler for investment is secure land access; this was done correctly. However commercialisation on temporary or customary land arrangements may generate additional risks, if the long term use of the land is not certain. Formal and clear community laws on land-use agreements, asset ownership, maintenance obligations and benefits sharing are thus needed for the project. The principle is not to lock in traditional systems, but to make sure that the switch to market agriculture does not take place at the expense of voice, security of tenure and control of communities.

5. The spatial variation of climate risk. The official climate assessments of the state of Mizoram have mentioned high degree of wetness and dryness hazard at the district level and the FOCUS 2.0 design have mentioned different agroecological zones and climate vulnerabilities. A one-size-fits all intervention package would thus be sub-optimal. Landslide exposure should be reflected in road and market design; dry-spell risk reflected in water investments; agroecology, elevation reflected in crop portfolio. District climate plans should be integrated as part of annual Zau investment plans, rather than existing as separate plans.

Way Forward

Many lessons have been learned from Phase I and are already being put into practice in FOCUS 2.0. The priority now is to turn those lessons into management rules which are explicit in annual plans and explicit in the field. The recommendations below are not about increasing the number of programme components but focus on implementation quality, Indigenous agency and climate evidence and market viability.

1. Employ a phase gated first 18 months. Prior to significant investment in infrastructure or in the enterprise, districts should pass a readiness gate. Readiness should be accompanied by recruitment of key personnel, confirmed lists of beneficiaries, land-use accords, climate-risk maps, market feasibility studies, procurement plans and baseline data and signed convergence commitments. This would directly solve Phase I’s issue of slow initial spending which accelerates later. It is not about delay, but about preparedness before spending, to ensure that it turns into assets and services.

2. Ensure that the programme has an outcome of Indigenous co-governance that is measurable. Decision rights regarding Zau planning, land-use arrangements, asset management and selection of local enterprises should be clearly established for Village Councils, Farmer Interest Groups and women’s groups and producer organizations. An annual governance scorecard can be used to document who is present at the meetings, who has ownership of the project’s assets, how grievances are handled, and whether community recommendations were adopted. This would shift from a targeting statement to institutional practice, shifting Indigenous participation.

3. Develop a landless and customary land user’s tenure and investment protocol. The project should be able to standardise locally accepted long-term land-use agreements, define the length of the land use agreement and whether it is transferable, and clarify land use agreements that are temporary, such as orchards, irrigation systems, sheds, and soil improvements. Phase II should operationalize and scale that learning from Phase I, that land security can enable productive investment.

4. Incorporate DCI into the investment planning of Zau. All Zaus should be assigned a basic climate-risk profile that includes the risk of heavy rains, droughts, water-source reliability, erosion and landslides, crop diseases and interruption of access. Investment choices should then vary according to location: soil and drainage where there is an erosion risk; water harvesting and spring-shed where there is a dry spell risk; resilient road design where there is an access risk; and crop diversification where there is an increased risk of temperature and pest. This is a more efficient way of addressing the “climate resilience” as a farm input package.

5. Don’t count adoption as a measure of resilience. The list of indicators in the monitoring framework should include four indicators at the household level: variability in annual income, variability in crop yields, time needed to recover from climate and disease shocks, and number of independent household livelihood streams. These can be correlated with current adoption measures. Together they would identify a household with climate-smart technology and a household that is truly more resilient to and resilient from shocks.

FOCUS 2.0 is best understood not as a larger version of Phase I but as a test of whether Mizoram can institutionalize a different rural-development model: one in which climate resilience, Indigenous agency, cluster production and market access are designed as a single system. Phase I provides evidence that farm incomes, selected yields, institutional capacity and climate-smart adoption can improve, but it also shows that weak convergence, delayed implementation, limited market depth and weak attribution can substantially reduce the value of those gains. The central policy challenge for Phase II is therefore execution: converting a stronger design into durable, community-owned and financially viable rural institutions.

References

1. IFAD (2025). India 2000004677: FOCUS 2.0 Project Design Report, September 2025. https://www.ifad.org/en/w/corporate-documents/projects-programmes/india-2000004677-focus-2.0-project-design-report-september-2025

2. IFAD (2025). Final President’s Report / Lapse of Time document: India – Fostering Climate-Resilient Upland Farming Systems in the North-East (FOCUS 2.0), EB 2025/LOT/P.9. https://webapps.ifad.org/members/lapse-of-time/docs/english/EB-2025-LOT-P-9.pdf

3. IFAD (2026, 9 April). India and IFAD sign US$46 million agreement to boost climate-resilient farming in Mizoram. https://www.ifad.org/en/w/news/india-and-ifad-sign-us-46-million-agreement-to-boost-climate-resilient-farming-in-mizoram

4. Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India (2023). Annual Report 2022-23 – State-wise Scheduled Tribe population statistics. https://tribal.nic.in/downloads/Statistics/AnnualReport/AREnglish2223.pdf

5. Mizoram Science, Technology & Innovation Council (MISTIC), Government of Mizoram (2020). District Level Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment of Mizoram: Agriculture Sector. https://mistic.mizoram.gov.in/district-level-climate-change-vulnerability-assessment-of-mizoram-agriculture-sector/

6. MISTIC, Government of Mizoram (2020). Rainfall Induced Hazards Analysis of Mizoram. https://mistic.mizoram.gov.in/rainfall-induced-hazards-analysis-of-mizoram/

7. ICAR (2026 page update). Integrated Farming System improves tribal farmer’s livelihood in Mizoram. https://icar.gov.in/en/integrated-farming-system-improves-tribal-farmers-livelihood-mizoram

8. Directorate of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of Mizoram. FOCUS project overview and Phase I components. https://agriculturemizoram.nic.in/pages/focus.html

9. IFAD (2025). FOCUS 2.0 Project Design Report – mainstreaming, indigenous peoples, targeting and lessons learned sections. https://webapps.ifad.org/members/lapse-of-time/docs/english/EB-2025-LOT-P-9-PDR-India-FOCUS-2-0.pdf?attach=1

10. IFAD (2025). FOCUS 2.0 Project Design Report – Components, hub-and-spoke market model, Zau clusters and knowledge management. https://webapps.ifad.org/members/lapse-of-time/docs/english/EB-2025-LOT-P-9-PDR-India-FOCUS-2-0.pdf?attach=1

11. Independent Office of Evaluation, IFAD (2026, January). Project Completion Report Validation: Fostering Climate Resilient Upland Farming Systems in the North East (Mizoram and Nagaland States). https://ioe.ifad.org/documents/38714182/51672797/Fostering%20Climate%20Resilient%20Upland%20Farming%20Systems%20in%20the%20North%20East%20(Mizoram%20and%20Nagaland%20States)

12. Northeast Today (2025, 8 April). Mizoram CM Reviews FOCUS 2.0 Implementation Plan With IFAD Team. https://northeasttoday.in/northeast/mizoram/mizoram-cm-reviews-focus-2-0-implementation-plan-with-ifad-team/

13. EastMojo (2025, 8 April). FOCUS 2.0 to cover 700 villages, help thousands of farmers in Mizoram. https://eastmojo.com/free-digest/2025/04/08/focus-2-0-to-cover-700-villages-help-thousands-of-farmers-in-mizoram/

About the Contributor

Ayan Bordoloi is an intern with IMPRI, currently pursuing his master’s in political science at the University of Delhi. His research interests lie in federalism, tribal governance, and Northeast India’s political landscape.

Acknowledgements

The author extends sincere gratitude to the IMPRI team for their guidance and support, along with the reviewers Arya Gupta and Dolly Kaushik for their valuable feedback and insights.

Disclaimer

All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organization

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