SEARCH NGO

Our Story

Thirty-one years of patient work in the dryland.

SEARCH was founded in 1995 by a group of rural-development practitioners who shared a single conviction: that dryland poverty in Andhra Pradesh would not yield to short-term grants or top-down programmes. It would yield only to the slow work of reviving watersheds, building durable village institutions, and keeping value in the local economy.

The first project was a single watershed in Prakasam district — fourteen villages, one season, a percolation tank that started holding water for the first time in a decade. The model that emerged from it — water user groups, seasonal monitoring, federations of self-help groups — became the SEARCH template. Over the next two decades the work expanded across 22 districts and two states, but the unit of change has stayed the same: the village, the panchayat, the SHG.

Today SEARCH works across natural resource management; water, sanitation and hygiene; rural livelihoods and farmer producer organisations; and skill development. We hold GuideStar India’s Platinum certification, are FCRA-approved, and offer 80G tax exemption to Indian donors. Every rupee is accounted for; every project is anchored in a community institution that outlives it.