Furrowed with deep gullies, its topsoil all but gone, this degraded patch of land near Odagaon in Odisha’s Nayagarh district was once a dense forest. Whenever nature tried to reclaim it, the little shoots would be nibbled away by goats and sheep. The villagers who owned the land had lost all hope of ever growing crops here. But for Sabarmatee and her father Radhamohan — founders of Sambhav, a non-profit organisation that works on gender and environment — this was precisely what they were looking for: the challenge of rejuvenating land that had been written off.