The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
DTE tracks the developments in Sukhomajri which became a model of self-reliant development in the 1980s due to successful management of ecological wealth by HRMS. But the situation has changed now. The forest department has hijacked the forest created by the villagers, while control of water is going into private …
Bunga took the sukhomajri story forward The first village to follow Sukhomajri's development model was Bunga, just 30 km away in Haryana's Panchkula district (see timeline: Divergent trajectories). Its success is on a surer footing for now, because it is not dependent on the forest department, but it still needs …
Government must facilitate, not control The experiences of Sukhomajri and Bunga have a lesson: given the right conditions, external and internal, villages can be self-sustaining. But their inherent problems are also important lessons. Fixing these is the key to the success of the country's 2,000-odd rural development programmes. The National …
Even as we celebrate 60 years of Indian democracy, with millions of our people hungry, cynical and insecure, and living under the barrel of the gun (of the state or the extremists), we need to worry about the reach and quality of our political process. The National Rural Employment Guarantee …
On September 11, Hivre Bazar panchayat in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district won the first National Water Award for community-led water conservation. POPATRAO PAWAR,sarpanch of the village, talks to SUPRIYA SINGH On the village water budget: After taking up watershed development works in the village, we realised that one of the three …
Watershed development is an important component of rural development and natural resource management strategies in many countries. A watershed is a special kind of common pool resource: an area defined by hydrological linkages where optimal management requires coordinated use of natural resources by all users. Management is difficult because watershed …
World Development Report 2008 calls for greater investment in agriculture in developing countries.The report warns that the sector must be placed at the center of the development agenda if the goals of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 are to be realized.
Credit is one of the important inputs for rural development. The results will largely depend on the effective use of credit, and linkages developed with other requirements for the enterprise. The study on rural credit from various agencies such as commercial banks, regional rural banks, cooperative banks and District Rural …
The contradications of our rural credit system are somehow camouflaged by the "achievements" of disbursed targets and, of recent, by the success of programmes like doubling of agricultural credit. The time has come when we need to seriously look into the emerging possibility of zero-credit based organisation of production by …
IT was a power dinner. But it was soon to become a power-hungry one. Early September, Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar hosted a dinner for Intel chairman Craig Barrett during his ninth visit to India. A few high-profile cabinet ministers like FM P. Chidambaram and aviation minister Praful Patel were …
Union minister for rural development Raghuvansh Prasad Singh defends reports of irregularities in implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in a interview with Sandip Das Problem areas in implementing NREGA We have to change the mindset of officials who have been in charge of rural development schemes since …
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (nrega), 2006, is degenerating into yet another poverty alleviation scheme. At the same time, officials are congratulating themselves on the act's performance, and there is even talk of extending its scope. Their exhilaration betrays an ignorance of the contradictions between nrega's intent and ground …
