Although soils are generally considered to wet readily, some are actually water-repellent at the surface. This communication presents the recent progress in relating the severity of water repellency to different soil management practices and land uses under the lower Himalayan region of India.

This paper deals with agricultural development and policies in mountains and hills in the Himalayan region. Mountain agriculture (instead of being confined to field crops as in the case of the prime land in plains) is an integrated system of resource usage, linking various land-based activities.

Large cardamom (Amomum subulatum) is a perennial cash crop grown under the Himalayan alder (Alnus nepalensis) or mix forest tree species in the hills of Nepal, Darjeeling hills, Sikkim and Bhutan. The cardamom based agroforestry system in the Himalayas has proved to be a sustainable land use practice at the landscape level supporting multiple functions and ecosystem services.

Emphasis has been laid since long on the need for integrated catchment management and impactof landuse on catchment hydrology; but the two disciplines have not been amalgmated for creating catchment sensitive 'City Landuse plans'.