SAS 500

SAS 500 covers projects on environmental sustainability. This includes climate change and forest or wildlife conservation.

The workbook's case study for SAS 500 follows AB Responsible Services. This NPO has over 15 years of watershed-management experience. It works in Maharashtra's Ratnagiri and Raigad districts. This hilly region gets heavy monsoon rain, but struggles to store it, because the terrain lets water run off to the sea.

Its project is the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP). It built check dams and farm ponds. It desilted old structures and recharged borewells. It installed drinking-water pipelines too. The goal was to conserve soil, harvest rainwater, and raise farm productivity.

The project's own scale, as the workbook states it:

• 18 villages, combined population over 25,000
• Total investment: Rs 45.3 lakh
• Data collection sample: 5% of direct beneficiaries (farmers, local business owners, community members), using Key Informant Interviews, Focus Group Discussions and quantitative surveys
• A separately reported physical result: 177 hectares of land brought under irrigation

The case study's stakeholders consulted: direct beneficiaries, AB Responsible Services' own implementing team, Panchayat and district-level government officials, and local NGOs working on environmental issues.

Named limitations, per the workbook: no baseline data for all indicators, especially qualitative ones; overlap between stakeholder groups (farmers are also part of the local community); and respondents struggling to answer some quantitative questions, particularly around rainfall and storm impact.

Figures are the workbook's own SAS 500 case study numbers.

AB Responsible Services spends Rs 45.3 lakh on the IWMP across 18 villages, and the case reports 177 hectares brought under irrigation as a direct result. On a simple basis, that works out to roughly Rs 25,600 per hectare brought under irrigation (45,30,000 ÷ 177).

An assessor applying SAS 500 would want to see this cost-per-hectare figure alongside the 5% beneficiary sample's own responses — whether farmers on those 177 hectares actually report higher yields, not just whether the infrastructure was completed — since output figures like hectares irrigated do not, on their own, prove the environmental-sustainability outcome SAS 500 is meant to assess.

Chapter 8 (Social Impact Assessment - Case Studies), section 8.1, builds its case study around SAS 500 and AB Responsible Services' IWMP, with the project's objective and scope, data collection method, and named limitations. Social Impact Assessment Standards (Chapter 5, Table 5.5) lists SAS 500 as covering environmental sustainability, climate change and conservation. Expect a question matching the IWMP or the 18-village, Rs 45.3 lakh figures to SAS 500.

• SAS 500 covers environmental sustainability, climate change and conservation — do not confuse it with SAS 1100 (housing) or SAS 1300 (financial inclusion), covered in the same chapter.
• 18 villages and over 25,000 population are the IWMP's scale figures — do not confuse the population count with the separate 177-hectare irrigation figure.
• The case study's own sample was 5% of direct beneficiaries, not 5% of villages.
• For the full sixteen-standard list, see Social Impact Assessment Standards — this page focuses specifically on SAS 500's own case study.