-Down to Earth More than half of the degraded land in the country is either rainfed farmland, responsible for the food security of the country, or forest land that offers the best defenc With close to 30 per cent of its geographical area already affected, land degradation is definitely among India’s most pressing environmental problems. To make matters worse, almost all Indian states have recorded an increase in degraded land in the...

-Down to Earth Solutions based on going back to nature do exist, but to make a tangible impact on climate change, they need to be executed at scale and with adequate support from both the developed and developing world Nature-based Solutions (NbS) is one of the key focus areas of the upcoming 26th Conference of Parties (CoP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Glasgow. ‘We’re part of...

In his Mann ki Baat address to the nation on 30th May, 2021, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi appreciated the fact that the farmers received "more than the minimum support price (MSP) for mustard" pertaining to the rabi production. One can easily guess from this statement of the PM that the mustard growers in Haryana (and elsewhere) preferred to sell their produce to private traders in the open market instead...

-TheWire.in Natural farming is a type of organic farming, based on the elimination of chemical inputs and use of locally available resources to reduce farmers' input costs and make agriculture remunerative. We need to fix agriculture in India – our current system is exploitative for both our farmers and the environment. Today, nearly all public spending in agriculture goes to support input-intensive practices that have only deepened the crisis. As we are...

-ThePrint.in 93-year-old Dr Johl explains why Punjab has been in an agrarian crisis for years, and how the lives of its stressed farmers can be made easier. Ludhiana: If Punjab’s march towards desertification is to be stopped, the best way is to move the cultivation of wheat and paddy out to 50 lakh hectares of land in the Gangetic plains of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, according to Dr Sardara Singh...