Natural Resources

This working paper by Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA) and Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC) deals with recent developments in tribal movements and livelihoods in Orissa. For the last few decades and more particularly since 1990’s the issue of human rights-violation of rights to life and livelihood of tribal peoples’ is a central concern. Therefore, the discourse on tribal movements and issues of tribal livelihood revolved around securing their well-defined rights on land and forest resources.

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This position paper by the National Rainfed Area Authority attempts to address the challenges of food security through analysis of the present trend of growth in production, procurement and safe storage of different foodgrain crops, their future potential and possible impact on national food security of diversification into non-PDS, fruits, vegetables and other commercial crops. This kind of analysis is likely to help planners and policy makers in choosing appropriate policy framework in evolving the strategies for enacting and operationalization of Food Security Act.

With increase in population, income and urbanization, the demand for food grains has also increased and diversified. Although there has been more than four-fold increase in food grain production from 1950-51 (50.82 mt) to 2008-09 (233.88 mt), a large section of our population continues to suffer from malnutrition and inadequacy of food grains. On the other hand degradation of land, water and other natural resources have started impacting production through increased biotic and abiotic stresses.

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This paper in Current Science projects the need of relevant and pertinent datasets to develop a soil information system for Tripura. In view of the global changing scenario the need of the hour is to produce a fresh group of earth scientists with specialization in soil and crop science, geology and geography with appreciable knowledge in GIS and other information technology software.

In view of the global changing scenario with the developments of GIS and other web technologies, dissemination of spatial information is undergoing a paradigm shift. Natural resource information is an essential pre-requisite for monitoring and predicting global environmental changes with special reference to climate. The scientists will be equipped to deal with data storage, and retrieval in a user-friendly mode for management recommendations, so that issues like land degradation, biodiversity, food security and climate change can be addressed adequately. This organized information forms a basis for storing soil and land databases for the implementation and monitoring of various efforts on land resource management.

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A civil society consultation was held on “Regenerating natural resources and rural livelihoods in rainfed areas of India” by WASSAN at Hyderabad in December 2010 to discuss priorities for the twelfth five year plan. The Planning Commission, Government of India has been steering the process of development in India by conceptualizing five year plans and had sought inputs from civil society organizations, activists groups, networks of CBOs / NGOs, donors and others for preparing an approach paper for twelfth plan.

The objective of the consultation workshop was to contribute to the process of defining broad contours of twelfth plan with a focus on rural livelihoods the thrust area being policy framework, funding support, institutional arrangements etc., by -Read More

• Consolidating the lessons from good practices in promoting and protecting rural livelihoods in the country, that could be integrated in twelfth five year plan.
• Systematically articulating issues and concerns (bottlenecks) in promoting and protecting rural livelihoods, which could be addressed in the twelfth five year plan.