Samaj Pragati Sahyog

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.

For the last 2 decades Samaj Pragati Sahayog (SPS) has implemented watershed management projects in an attempt to integrate regeneration of natural resources with livelihood security of the poor

SPS has recently completed production of two films, which are now available for purchase.

A review of this report by Dr. Mihir Shah, Samaj Pragati Sahyog (originally published in Economic and Political Weekly in 2006)
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Earthen dams are a very common and cost-effective watershed intervention. This multimedia course gives an understanding of the principles of earthen dams, the types of earthen dams and the parameters to be considered in their construction. It goes into the detail of the steps to be followed in constructing these dams.

This course is part of a multimedia course series developed by Arghyam for the India Water Portal in collaboration with IT and domain experts.