Mountains constitute one-fifth of the land on our planet. About ten percent of the world’s people and a wide variety of flora and fauna live on their slopes. Their altitude changes create different agroclimatic conditions and diverse ecosystems; their seclusion and remoteness has made them the last bastions of globally significant biodiversity and cultural heterogeneity.

Mountains are also the storehouses of the world for many life-giving resources- freshwater, fuelwood and timber, minerals, hydroelectric power, fodder, resins, plant fibres, medicines. Mountains are the source of some 80% of the water on the earth’s surface and the freshwater supplies for at least half of humanity. About a third of the world's protected areas for biodiversity conservation are in mountain regions. They harbor valuable medicinal and food plants and rare and beautiful animal species, and are important biological corridors and sanctuaries for plants and animals long since eliminated from the more transformed lowlands.

Every mountain slope is, from the anthropo-geographical standpoint, a complex phenomenon. It displays a whole range of cultural features/combinations- a variety of occupations from commercial cropping and agro-processing to nomadic pastoralists, every degree of density from congestion to vacancy, every range of cultural development from industrialisation to nomadism. The isolation bred by the high mountain ranges have helped nurture a multiplicity of tribes with unique cultures that include languages, social structures, and spiritual traditions. Each tribe also has its own arts & crafts (weaving, metal craft, architecture, music & dance) and certain invaluable traditional knowledge systems (ethnobotany, medicine). This knowledge is most often far more holistic in nature than modern systems, and may have the solutions to many of our modern-day problems.

Mountain ecosystems are today in grave danger from the increasing pressures on them and overexploitation of their resources. Their fragility and complexity make mountain environments especially sensitive to unsustainable resource use, unplanned development, and global climatic change. Environmental pressures are leading to deforestation and desilting, extinction of endemic species, and increasing ecological threats. The unique cultures of the mountain lands are today threatened by the winds of change and the negative impacts of modernisation. And the indigenous mountain communities that are stewards of invaluable and irreplaceable treasures of cultural and biological diversity, remain among the poorest in the world, the valleys they inhabit the least developed in terms of basic infrastructure and facilities. Livelihood options are also limited given the constraints of the environment, the demographics, and technology.

Pragya is working with indigenous mountain communities, facilitating appropriate development in these threatened, overexploited mountains and their poor inner valleys. The current focus is on the Himalayan region. Grassroots projects in three pockets of the Himalayas, viz, cold deserts of the Western Indian Himalayas, the high altitude valleys and meadows of the Central Indian Himalayas and the biodiversity hotspots of the Eastern Indian Himalayas, blend economic development of indigenous communities with biodiversity and cultural heritage conservation.