Home » India Region » NABARD in Partnership with Gates Foundation and Dalberg Launches National Climate Stack Innovation Challenge With ₹15 Lakh Top Prize
10 March 2026, New Delhi: The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Dalberg Advisors, has launched the National Climate Stack Innovation Challenge, a national initiative aimed at developing climate intelligence solutions to strengthen resilience in agriculture and rural livelihoods across India.
The challenge, which opened for applications on 6 March 2026, invites research institutions, universities, startups, and innovators to design near-term climate hazard forecasting models and practical dashboards that can support climate-informed decision-making in agriculture and rural development.
India is increasingly facing climate-related risks such as heatwaves, floods, droughts and cyclones, which are placing growing pressure on agricultural systems and rural economies. Although the availability of climate data has improved in recent years, forecasting tools and datasets remain fragmented across multiple platforms and models. As a result, existing risk management systems often remain reactive rather than predictive.
According to Dr. G. R. Chintala Shaji, India has made considerable progress in collecting and analysing climate data, but much of this information is scattered across different platforms. He noted that the National Climate Stack Innovation Challenge aims to bring together innovators and researchers to develop solutions that integrate multiple climate data streams in a seamless and accessible manner. The initiative seeks to make climate information more widely available and usable for decision-makers in rural India.
The challenge aims to mobilize India’s scientific and innovation ecosystem to contribute toward the development of a National Climate Stack. The initiative is expected to support the creation of credible 10–15 year climate hazard forecasting frameworks that can serve as the foundational forecasting layer for the stack. In addition, participants are encouraged to build practical dashboards that demonstrate operational applications of climate intelligence for agriculture, rural finance and public planning.
The competition will follow a multi-stage process beginning with a national call for proposals from eligible institutions and innovators. Submissions will undergo screening and shortlisting during March and April 2026. Shortlisted teams will then participate in a six to eight week guided development phase to refine their models with expert inputs. Final solutions will be evaluated through independent technical validation followed by jury-led selection of winners between May and June 2026.
Entries will be evaluated based on scientific rigor, explainability, practical relevance, interoperability and scalability, ensuring that proposed solutions are both technically robust and suitable for real-world implementation.
The initiative is anchored in Data in Climate Resilient Agriculture (DiCRA), NABARD’s climate data platform. Through the challenge, NABARD aims to strengthen the platform’s evolution from a digital public good into a digital public infrastructure capable of supporting interoperable and forecasting-enabled climate intelligence systems.
Under the programme, the top three teams will receive awards of ₹15 lakh, ₹10 lakh and ₹5 lakh, respectively. Selected solutions may also be considered for pilot implementation and potential adoption through NABARD and partner programmes aimed at strengthening climate resilience in agriculture and rural livelihoods.
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