In the hills of Uttarakhand climate change is leading to reduced water from snow-melt being availability for irrigation and more extreme weather events. This is making crop production difficult and some crop land is being abandoned. Men are migrating to find work and many of the women remaining in the villages would like to earn an income from milk production.

The International Livestock Research Institute has adopted an innovation platform approach as a route to dairy development in the hills of Uttarakhand. Innovation platforms are a way to bring together different stakeholders to identify solutions to common problems or to achieve a common goal. They ensure that different interests are taken into account, and that various groups contribute to finding solutions. Used by the private sector for many years to gather information and improve networking among key stakeholders in a particular economic sector, they caught the attention of development agencies…