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 …
A RURAL health programme operating arolmd Sevagram in Maharashtra has given new expression to Mahatma Gandhi's dream of rural development. The scheme, based on self-help and risk-sharing through insurance, is proof that quality health care can be provided in rural areas at an affordable cost. The moving force behind the …
MAHATMA Gandhi's Sevagram ashram in Maharashtra was the appropriate site for a recent conference marking the birth centenary of J C Kumarappaan economist who became one of Gandhiji's closest associates and the most ardent advocate of his ideas on rural development. Through prolific writing in books and magazines over a …
MAHATMA Gandhi wanted Indian economics to be based on facts and figures obtained through rigorously scientific surveys. In 1930, he urged J C Kumarappa to conduct an economic survey of Matar taluka, a famine-stricken area in Gujarat's Kaira district. Kumarappa's pathbreaking study of conditions prevailing in rural India is still …
On the virtues of a natural life If we have to utilise as food the nutritious elements found in nature, we may get gur from palm trees that grow wild on uncultivable lands and obtain the whole benefit of the sap, minus the water which it contains, along with the …
The provisions in agriculture are equally growth-oriented, says JNU vice chancellor Y K Alagh, who is an agricultural economist. "The most dangerous thing in the rural sector was the drying up of credit flow. This budget has reversed that," he says. Alagh is most critical of the budgetary provisions for …
There is mixed official opinion on the budgetary allocation for environment, which shows an increase of Rs 40 crore over the previous year's amount of Rs 329.81 crore. But, says Vinay Shankar, additional secretary, MEF, "The real increase this year is by about Rs 66 crore. We should take into …
You have questioned the appropriateness of the system of national parks in developing countries. What are your objections? The idea of national parks came up in the West with the object of preserving the wilderness. Given the size and population of countries like the United States, it was feasible. But …
THAT LITERACY is liberation may be rhetoric in many parts of the country, but not in Tamil Nadu's Pudukkottai district. Total literacy was reported in this granite quarry region in August 1992, and it brought with it, for the scores of women workers, freedom from bondage and penury. Today, a …
INDIA is probably the most industrialised developing country in the world today, with more than a million trained scientists. But this has only resulted in creating a deeply divided society. The last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of institutions set up to promote rural development through science and technology. …
THE GRAND Mughal Akbar, whose 450th birth anniversary was marked this year, once remarked he would venerate the person who could grow two blades of grass where one grew previously. Was he not talking of Appropriate Technology, a term that has come into vogue more than four centuries later? It …
THE PRODUCTS of my research are men, women and children, fully trained to demonstrate the potential power of Mother Earth to retain and use every drop of rain as it falls and where it falls. They are common people but they have a strange power. And, I am determined to …
Anna in Marathi means brother and Kishan Baburao Hazare is lovingly known as Anna Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi, the village in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district that he helped transform from poverty to plenty. Yet, though life in the village has changed, Anna continues to live in a small room in the …
THIS ORGANISATION (Council for Advancement of People's Action and Rural Technology or CAPART) has two elements. One is to advance people's action. This is not new at all... From time immemorial our rural societies have had a very great amount of autonomy built into their functioning. Whether it was a …
IN A RECENT speech, Prime Minister Narasimha Ra called upon voluntary agencies to participate actively in the country's rural development programmes and gave a categorical assurance it "is not going to be a sarkari programme." Pointing out the Eighth Plan has allocated Rs 30,000 crore for rural development, which will …
Voluntary agencies, at their September meet organised by the Voluntary Action Network of India (VANI), have declaimed the government's attempts to network NGOs as "a strategy to suppress the growing voluntary sector in India". In April this year, the Planning Commission got together 50 voluntary agencies to discuss "mechanisms to …
I'VE JUST made a rather chastening, even humiliating, discovery. To prepare for this piece, I glanced through the two huge files of yellowing cuttings, which record my 70 months or so of subcontinental reporting for The Guardian. And in all that time, I've written only a couple of dozen longish …
IN PLACES like Uttar Kannada, M D Subhash Chandran, a botanist from the Dr Baliga College of Arts and Sciences, Kumta, in Karnataka, claims that the ban on shifting cultivation was largely motivated by the need to release labour for the new plantations that were coming up in the area. …
IF ONE were to visit the beach along Inchampakkam, a fishing village off the Madras-Mahabalipuram highway, one would see, amongst the wooden catamarans, a few black plastic ones. Catamarans made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE) are becoming popular in Inchampakkam and its nearby villages, despite their high price -- between Rs …
AKHTAR Hameed Khan, 78, started his career in 1936 with the Indian Civil Service in erstwhile Bengal where he rose to become director of the Academy for Rural Development in Comilla. Returning to Pakistan after the creation of Bangladesh, he took up a research fellowship in Faislabad and then joined …
The Indian Social Institute, New Delhi was established in 1951 in response to the challenges of nation- building and a new emerging social order of independent India. It has evolved its vision, mission, goals and objectives in responding to the changing situation in the country in the spirit of a …
