India

“Agricultural Statistics at a Glance 2010”  is compiled by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Department of Agriculture and Cooperation. It provides a wide range of data on outlays, expenditure and capital formation, crop production and productivity across States, markets and prices, terms of trade, price support and procurement, domestic and international trade, credit, insurance etc.,

Timely availability of reliable information on agricultural output and other related aspects is of great significance for planning and policy making particularly, in the management of concerns in areas such as food security, price stability, international trade etc. The information is extremely useful in identifying problem areas and the nature of required intervention in terms of spatial, temporal and qualitative inferences. The handbook presents a comprehensive picture of the progress made by the agriculture sector at the All India level as well as across the States. 

This paper discusses the need to shift from chemical intensive agriculture to organic farming. The authors in their vision for a chemical-free agriculture also stress that organic agriculture is a way to achieve food security.

The authors begin with the current crisis in Indian agriculture. Stating that though the Green Revolution made India self-sufficient in food production in the shortest time it also resulted in a host of problems. The indiscriminate use of fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides has created problems of decline in the soil fertility, pollution of water resources, and chemical contamination of food grains, amongst the many similar issues now linked to the Green Revolution.

These two reports discuss the dependency of agriculture on phosphorous and the ways to mitigate the problem.

The first report looks at agricultural dependence of chemical nutrients on a global scale and even discusses the potential international political fallout of a reduction in phosphorous. The second report is focused on ways to tackle the dependency on this mineral, in the Indian context. However, both speak of the need for finding alternatives to the current methods of obtaining phosphorous, which is largely through mining.

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)organised the Water India conference, around the theme “Transforming the municipal and industrial water landscape - Issues, challenges and opportunities".

 But as you may recall as it was reported before on this forum that his son died in need of attention when he was still struggling to get his wages.

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 Temperature may go beyond 45 degrees in certain pockets, but number of such days will be very less. Certain pockets in northern India will have 1 to 2 degree high temperature than normal at times and eastern India will remain cooler. The peninsular region and central India will be near normal.

A summary of major recommendations of Working Group are as follows: -

Article courtesy: Press Information Bureau

The Union Cabinet has approved the Comprehensive Mission Document of the National Water Mission.

The National Water Mission is one of the 8 National Missions which form the core of the National Action Plan for Climate Change. The Mission Document for National Water Mission was drafted by the Ministry of Water Resources through consultative process with full involvement of State Governments, concerned Central Ministries, Non-Governmental Organizations, academicians and other stakeholders.