Our Story
Grihvatika began inside Nyayapath, with a question a grandmother could answer and the internet could not: what should I plant here, now, in this soil?
Grihvatika is the Community Gardening Project of Nyayapath, a charitable trust that has worked since 2001 on legal awareness, traditional knowledge and sustainable living. The project began where two of the trust’s objectives meet: preserving the plant knowledge held by indigenous and local communities, and promoting sustainable agriculture for everyday health.
The problem it was set up against is a familiar one. A household wants to grow food or medicine on a balcony, searches for help, and finds advice written for English gardens — peat, frost dates, plants that die in a Delhi May. Meanwhile the knowledge that would actually answer the question is held by people who were never asked, and is disappearing about as fast as they are.
So the work runs in two directions at once. On the ground, the project turns underused urban land into productive gardens — the first of them in Agra and Lucknow, growing medicinal plants and herbs for daily household use, with workshops on rainwater harvesting, composting and waste management. Online, it builds a plant library that records what grows where, what it is called locally, and who told us — written in plain language, free to read, and open to correction by anyone who knows better.
Grihvatika has no separate legal identity: it is run, governed and funded through Nyayapath. How that works, and who is accountable for what.