India

The issues of sustainable food security assume national importance, as the country is debating on the crucial National Food Security Bill. Breaking yield barrier, accelerating growth of production and ensuring sustainability are the critical policy concerns in Indian agriculture.

The roundtable discussion underlined the need to harness the opportunities offered by the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) and its extensions to crop production in many areas. This may help in substantially reducing the need for embedded subsidies in every grain of rice while achieving increases in yield by 15 per cent to 40 per cent or more over present conventional methods. In India about 1.7 million farmers are estimated to have adopted the technique on more than 7.5 lakh hectares across 160 districts, without any major project funding so far. Tamil Nadu and Tripura are the leading states for adoption of SRI, but many others are following suit.

Ascenso Management & Consulting Services Pvt. Ltd (AMCSPL), New Delhi is an independent consultancy company offering high quality technical services in the field of Environment, Health & Safety. It was started as Ascent Management & Consulting Group which has been active in this field since its inception.

Aaranyak is a registered society working in the field of biodiversity conservation in North East India since 1989. Its strength lies in applied research in biological and social field and its thrust area of work is the North Eastern India and Eastern Himalayas.

Sambodhi was conceptualized in 2005 to offer Research and Advisory services to different organizations. We are a rapidly growing organization. We have delivered effective results in Development Consulting and Research, Project Management Advisory and Business Analytics. Training is yet another area where we have made our presence felt convincingly.

Swaraj University is a two-year learning program that creates opportunities for young learners to develop the knowledge, skills and perspectives they need to create viable green-collar enterprises and to support healthy and resilient local communities. This self-directed learning process invites learners to identify their hearts’ visions and engages them in developing the skills, relationships and practices they need to manifest those visions.

The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR, India) in association with the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, France), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Germany), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, The Netherlands) invite applications for joint social science networking proposals between research centres in the participating European countries and India.

The occurrences of some exceptionally heavy rainfall during the recent years causing flash floods in many areas necessitated the study of long term changes in extreme rainfall over India.

The study includes the analysis of the frequency of rainy days, number of rainy days and heavy rainfall days as well as one-day extreme rainfall and return period analysis in order to observe the impact of climate change on extreme weather events and flood risk. It has been found that frequency of heavy rainfall events are decreasing in major parts of the central and north India while increasing in peninsular India, east and north east India.

The report provides interesting findings that are useful for hydrological planning and disaster managements such as –

It is a part of the Global Scaling Up Rural Sanitation project of the Water and Sanitation Programme, World Bank and focuses on learning how to combine the approaches of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), behavior change communications, and social marketing of sanitation to generate sanitation demand and strengthen the supply of sanitation products and services at scale, leading to improved health for people in rural areas. This is one in a series of knowledge products designed to showcase project findings, assessments and lessons learned in the project.

Over the last few years, the concept of open-defecation free communities has emerged as one of the building blocks toward achieving total sanitation. The term ‘access’ is widely used to capture increase in sanitation usage. However, a clean environment is a public good. Hence, there was a need to achieve total sanitation at the community level to realize public health benefits. This has led policy makers and practitioners to adopt strategies that achieve community-wide total sanitation status, which includes the community becoming open-defecation free, and adopting safe hygiene and environmental sanitation practices.