Ummeed, the word means hope in Hindi. It’s also the name we gave to our second soil carbon project, registered under Verra’s VM0042 methodology across Maharashtra and Gujarat.
The name wasn’t accidental.
When we launched Aadi in Northern India, we were proving a hypothesis: that high-integrity, smallholder soil carbon credits could be delivered at scale in India under the world’s most demanding voluntary carbon standard. The market was sceptical. Emerging markets had a poor track record on carbon quality. Indian agriculture was too fragmented, too complex, too hard to verify.
Aadi answered that. Ummeed answers a different question entirely.
A Different Crop. A Different Market. A Different Answer.
Aadi operates in the rice-wheat belt of Punjab and Haryana. The regenerative practices there direct-seeded rice, reduced tillage for wheat are specific to that system.
Ummeed is built for Maharashtra and Gujarat: India’s cotton country. The practices are different (fertigation, crop residue management, reduced tillage for multi-crop systems), the geography is different, and critically the buyer profile is different.
For global apparel and fashion brands, Ummeed is not just a carbon offset. It is supply chain climate action with a traceable address. The farms in these states are, in many cases, the same farms producing the cotton that eventually becomes your product. When your brand invests in Ummeed credits, you are not neutralising emissions somewhere abstract you are improving soil health, reducing water use, and strengthening the economic resilience of the farmers who sit at the base of your supply chain. That’s a fundamentally different story to tell your customers than a forestry offset in a country you’ve never sourced from.
For brands under growing regulatory pressure to demonstrate Scope 3 reductions not just offsets, but verified, traceable, on-farm reductions this distinction matters enormously.
What Two Registrations Actually Signal
Globally, 236 projects have entered the VM0042 registration pipeline. Twenty have made it through. Grow Indigo now holds two of those twenty.
That is not two lucky outcomes. It is proof that our operational approach, the farmer network, the MRV infrastructure, is replicable across different crop systems and different states. We didn’t build a Aadi shaped company. We built a platform.
For credit buyers evaluating supply risk, that distinction matters. A developer with one project is a bet on that project. A developer with two independently registered projects in two distinct agroecological contexts is demonstrating something more durable.
The Farmer Equation
None of this scales without the farmer at the centre of it.
In Maharashtra and Gujarat, thousands of smallholders are now adopting fertigation, reducing tillage, and managing crop residues differently. These are not trivial changes. They require trust, education, and most importantly a compelling economic case. Grow Indigo’s model ensures 60% of gross carbon credit proceeds flow directly to participating farmers as a performance linked revenue stream. The project’s carbon value is real only because the farmer’s behaviour change is real.
When payments arrive following issuance, they will land in communities that have waited through a multi-year validation cycle to see it happen. That’s the other meaning of ummeed.
Beyond the Tonne: The SDG Dimension
Soil carbon projects are often evaluated purely on their climate numbers. Ummeed’s impact runs wider than that.
Regenerative practices that restore soil organic matter and reduce input dependency directly strengthen farm productivity and long-term food security, a concrete contribution to SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) in a region where smallholder livelihoods depend on it. The structured training and knowledge transfer embedded in farmer onboarding advances SDG 4 (Quality Education), building durable agronomic capability that outlasts any single crediting cycle. And the project’s verified, measurable emission reductions across both soil carbon sequestration and reduced emissions make it a concrete expression of SDG 13 (Climate Action) in one of the world’s most agriculturally significant landscapes.
These aren’t incidental co-benefits. They’re part of why high-integrity agricultural carbon programmes matter beyond the registry.
What’s Next
Registration is the beginning of the crediting cycle, not the end. The Ummeed Project now moves toward issuance.
For apparel brands and credit buyers interested in participating in the next issuance or in understanding how Ummeed fits within a broader portfolio we welcome the conversation.
Want to source responsible? Reach out to us at clearharvest@growindigo.co.in
Interested to know more about the credits? Explore: https://www.growindigo.co.in/credit-buyer/x