Himachal Pradesh

This report on farmers’ experiences on System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in India by ICRISAT and WWF is an effort to compile the experiences of those farmers who pioneered the SRI method in various regions. They experimented in their own way, articulating their point of view on the method. 

The SRI is a national phenomenon in India and rice-cultivating farmers, particularly those who have less than one hectare of land, have experimented, refined, adopted and are promoting SRI. It is their hard work and trust that has spread this unknown method into all rice-growing states. Out of 564 rice-growing districts in India, SRI is being practiced by the farmers in about 216 districts.

This document outlining the Environment Policy Guidelines of the Department of Science and Technology, Government of Himachal Pradesh has developed approaches compatible with mountain ecosystems and its unique aspects such as fragility, inaccessibility, marginality, diversity, climatic peculiarities, scattered population and small agricultural holdings. 

This set of case studies is part of a book prepared by Lokayan in collaboration with the Planning Commission titled “Seeds of Hope", covers themes of agricultur

The study aims to assess the impacts of various climate scenarios on the hydrological response of the high altitude Spiti river in the Himalayas. The climatic scenarios were constructed on the basis of simulations of the Hamburg coupled atmosphere-ocean climate model for the study region.

The study presents automated mapping of snow cover using a new spectral channel of Indian Remote Sensing (IRS-IC) data for the Spiti sub-basin of the Satluj river basin. Snow is an important phase of the hydrological cycle and the estimation of snowmelt runoff in the Himalayan rivers, either seasonal or daily, is of immense use in proper management and use of water resources in the basins.

The study estimates the average contribution of snow and glacier melt runoff in the annual flow of Satluj river at Bhakra dam. This study is restricted to the Indian part of Satluj basin. A water balance approach was used to determine the average snow and glacier contribution to the annual flows.

The study assesses sedimentation rate, water spread area and volume of the Bhakra reservoir in Satluj basin using remote sensing data of IRS-1B satellite and LISS-II sensor data of the years 1988-89 and 1996-97. The original elevation-area capacity curves and the reservoir levels on the eight dates of pass of the satellite were obtained from the Bhakra Beas Management Board, Nangal.

Using the trapezoidal formula, the capacity in between the maximum (513.904 m) and minimum (450.436 m) observed levels was assessed for the year 1996-97. The loss of capacity till 1988-89 was 491.315 mcum and till 1996-97 was 807.354 mcum. These could be attributed to the sediment deposition in the zone of study of reservoir.

The Renuka Dam Project proposed over the river Giri Ganga (a tributary of the Yamuna) located some 300km away from Delhi, is a joint project of the governments of Himachal Pradesh (HP) and Delhi, to be constructed by the Himachal Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (HPPCL) in Sirmaur district of HP.

Love for green: Healing the hills with trees - Work of Sachidanand Bharti in Uttarakhand

From Tubaah (NDTV Network) website (November 26, 2008).

Sachidanand Bharti is known as the treeman in Uttarakhand, where he has been dedicatedly planting trees since the last 25 years. Hills in Uttarakhand were once barren, but now they are lush green, all due to his efforts. Bharti is a school teacher by profession but his real calling is as a climate crusader.

This brief article by Prof Jayanta Bandyopadhyay in the May 16-31 2010 issue of Business Economics magazine, highlights the recent plans of the central and state goverments of constructing a large number of dams on Himalayan rivers. Environmentalists continue to consistently argue against the construction of dams that are built without respect for ecological sciences and warn that this could lead to increase in disasters in the fragile Himalayan region.