Introduction: The Himalayan Ecology & Treatment of Natural Agriculture Samiti acronyms as ‘HETONA’  is well known in its working areas was formed in 1991 by some like-minded volunteers who then plunged themselves in a famous and devastating Uttarkashi earthquake’s rescue and relief operation. With their experience as rescue and relief volunteers, they decided to form an organization, which can work in hilly conditions and efficiently deliver the outcomes during testing time. The organization ‘HETONA’ was registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860 and later on under Income Tax Act 1961 and Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act 2010. The Society’s basic character is charitable and democratic in its functioning and secular in its thoughts.

Mission: HETONA envisages to provide skill and knowledge to the underprivileged strata of the society so that they can recognize and use the resources around them for their holistic empowerment.

Objectives:

• To work for environmental conservation
• To work for gender equality and women empowerment
• To work for rural drinking water supply and environmental sanitation
• To work for climate-resilient sustainable mountain agriculture
• To promote organic farming with traditional and modern methodologies and link with the market.
• To work for the livelihood improvements of the vulnerable sections of the society
• To work for the upliftment of scheduled castes, tribes and minorities
• To form community-based organizations, train and build their capacity to include them in the development process.

General Objective is to identify, tap and optimally harness the potential of the underprivileged classes of the society in such a way as to strike a judicious balance between their own quality of life as well as towards their meaningful contribution in the society/nation.Works: Since its inception, HETONA has been working in two types of projects; 1 facilitating, organizing, and implementing the self-conceptualized and planned projects/programmes and 2 providing social and technical intermediary services to the projects/programmes of governments, semi-government and other NGOs.   

• It is a rural based charitable environmental organization working for mountain poor.
• It promotes ecofriendly climate resilient, sustainable mountain agriculture practices.
• It applies participatory rural appraisal tool for community participation.
• It works on the formation and empowerment of the community based organizations

The primary motivation of NGO Corporate partnership is NGO’s need of funding and Corporate’s need to enhance its brand, reputation and credibility. Though both are very different in their goals, structures, motivating factors and cultures, however, they enter into relationships with each other with differing objectives. The corporate can consider NGO as partner in several key areas like Knowledge about execution challenges, facilitating factors and inhibitors on the ground, particularly in unfamiliar areas, establishing key relationships with local actors and communities and building brand equity, whereas NGOs receive essential funding from the corporates to meet their social objectives.

HETONA working in the field of sustainable mountain agriculture needs corporate partnership because food, water and clean air are the basic requirement of every human being how rich and poor he/she is. Apart from industries, transportation and electricity, it is the agriculture which is a major contributor of methane and nitrous oxide is reasonably responsible for exacerbating the greenhouse gas emissions a main reason of global warming and its side effects like rising sea level, weather extremes and variations in precipitations. This is not only affecting the water and air quality, but also deeply affecting the agriculture, its land quality, productivity, production and food nutrient and security. Therefore, climate resilient sustainable farming practices and their intensification will not only improve soil health, productivity and production but also contribute in decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sinks.

Therefore, there is need of working social based NGOs with the corporates. HETONA as a rural based organization has an idea, local manpower and good rapport with the community, but its financial resources are quite inadequate to meet the requirements of change envisaged by it. Hence a partnership with corporates is essential to meet financial as well as market gaps. For example our focus is on motivating, training and exposures of smallholders of rain fed mountain agriculture to produce nutrient rich crops like barnyard millet, finger millet, foxtail millet, proso millet, amaranths, and leguminous crops like cowpea, pigeonpea, kidney pea, horse gram and dry beans. Its value addition and marketing is also equally important as the production is. A partnership with corporate will not only offloads the financial burden on the organization, but also helps in organic certification of the product thus adding the value to stimulate market demand. In this way HETONA also visualize to cater to the need of organic nutritional food to consumers.