In the initial years, MSSM was working as an informal (non-registered) group with War-on-Want, a Scottish Missionary, later merged with MSSM, in Jalna. The organisations provided agricultural inputs to farmers and helped them with development of irrigation potential through well sinking.

First in India to use Down-the-hole (DTH) drilling technology for tapping groundwater in 1963 imported ‘down-the-hole DTH’ drilling machine for drilling boreholes primarily for drinking water.

First in India to deploy geo-physical investigations for groundwater prospecting in 1965 and has applied the technique for years.

Design and development of Jalna Pump, precursor of the renowned India Mark-II deep well hand-pump, in 1966, is a creditable achievement of MSSM. Howsoever large in scale, such efforts gradually became less effective due to recurrent droughts and resultant degradation of land, water, vegetative and livestock resources.

First to promote improved seed production in collaboration of MAHYCO in 1967. This was an approach to establish forward-backward linkages among corporate and farmers, for betterment of agriculture and farmers.

First in the country to experiment ‘artificial recharge’ for enhancing groundwater in Revgaon village in year 1970. This proved its importance to fight-out vagaries of monsoon, in the worst affecting drought of 1972.

With experiences of recurrent drought and degradation of natural resources, MSSM adopted watershed approach in few villages from 1974 in village Dev Pimpalgaon, where natural resource conservation and community based utilization was the prime focus for agriculture development.

Adgaon Watershed Project was the first watershed development project in the country, implemented with the principle of ‘ridge to valley’, in 1983. Adgaon showed a new light to the country to fight and mitigate vagaries of drought to a reasonable extent.

Watershed development encompasses management of all natural resources; soil conservation was demonstrated and promoted as most vital activity of watershed development, which led to policy changes and improvement in watershed treatment measures. Developed socio-technical methodology for planning and implementation of watershed development further popularly termed as ‘net planning’.

Cement check weir is very popular for water conservation but purely an engineering measure and therefore, to make it suitable for site specific conditions on technical parameters and to make it cost effective improvements in designing and construction were experimented in various projects.

Seed sowing for vegetative regeneration

Mechanisation

Agriculture extension

Integrated Pest Management – Biological control

Groundwater augmentation through non-conventional measures – Shivni Fracture Seal Cementation Technique for enhancing groundwater potential for agriculture.