Food and Nutrition

Theme: Meet the Millet! Say hello to HEALTH

Organizer: Sahaja Samrudha

Venue: Gandhi Bhavan, Bangalore
 

This is the opinion of Bijay Kumar, Managing Director of National Horticulture Board (NHB). He was expressing this in an exclusive interview to Panasam Wonders.

He regretted “We are not able to exploit its full potential. But as it is a good livelihood option for the weaker sections of the society, it’s high time to concentrate our efforts for its development.”

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 -

• 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.

It also attempted to examine how policy interventions threatened this knowledge base and the sustainable practices it supported.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Dec 29, 2010 (IPS) - When French Jesuit priest and passionate agriculturist Henri de Laulanie developed the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of cultivation for Madagascar’s poor farmers in the 1980s, he probably had no idea that millions of farmers elsewhere in the world would one day benefit from it as well.

The scarcity value of natural resources has risen due to rising pressure of human population and demands made by modern economics progress. As such managing these resources has become very important.

This paper discusses the advantages of system of rice intensification over normal paddy cultivation. The researcher compare the performance of System of Rice Intensification (SRI) and normal rice fields in two mandals (subdistricts) of Mahabubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh. The yields from these two systems and agronomics are compared.

The need to find less water intensive methods of agriculture become important as there is a reduction in the scope of enhancing irrigation base for increase in food production. It is in this context that this research has been carried out.