-India Water Portal NREGA has emerged as a go-to scheme for water conservation in tribal areas leading to higher irrigation coverage and thus augmenting agricultural production Out of India’s total population of 1210.19 million, 104 million, i.e., 8.6% are tribal (Census, 2011), India has one of the highest diversity among the tribes in the world. Broadly tribal inhabit two distinct geographical areas – the Central Indian Tribal Belt and the North-East. About...

-TheWire.in * Debal Deb began conserving indigenous varieties of rice in the 1990s after realizing that they were losing cultivation ground to other varieties preferred by the Green Revolution. * In an extended interview with The Wire Science, he explained what makes a crop resilient, why farmers should be considered scientists, and the perils of technological solutionism. * Deb also spoke at length about the problems with the Green Revolution and its troubled...

-TheWire.in * The proposed Biological Diversity (Amendment) Bill 2021 encourages a conducive environment for investments and to simplify the patent application process. * Farmers in India have historically been against any kind of IP rights – whether patents or plant variety protection over seed and planting materials. * In a confused mix of laws, the government also grants IP rights to BMCs for farmers’ varieties – formed under the Biological Diversity Act –...

-NITI Aayog Working Paper, ISBN: 978-81-953811-7-3 Abstract -  The importance of agriculture in an economy usually declines as it climbs the development ladder. Raising agriculture productivity has been known to be an important precursor. Labour productivity in agriculture can either be increased by higher land productivity or higher land availability per farmer and mechanisation. In India, however, the dramatic increase in land productivity through industrial farming has caused severe environmental damage and...

-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...