Goa and Kerala have jointly won the Indira Priyadarshini Vriksha Mitra (IPVM) Award 2008 for small States with a geographical area below 80,000 sq km for absolute and percentage increase in Forest & tree Cover respectively. Each of the States will be given Rs 2.50 lakh along with a scroll and a citation.
By gaining critical control over seeds rural women have recovered traditional landraces and biodiversity in agriculture. Initiatives such as Alternative PDS and Food Sovereignty Trust by Deccan Development Society have not only ensured heightened access to food and nutrition but have also empowered women by strengthening their leadership abilities.
A cooperative of landless women in Gujarat are making a successful living through collective farming. By converting their village into an eco tourism centre, they are conserving and promoting local cultures and cuisine.
Senna (Cassia angustifolia) a native of Saudi Arabia is now cultivated extensively in Western Rajasthan. The main advantage of the crop is that it does not require the application of any fertilizers and it is not devoured by insects, animals or birds. Also the plant is eco-friendly as it can be used for developing wastelands and does not require frequent irrigation.
Contaminated lands, blighted by fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, could be cleaned up in a clever way: by growing biofuels. Belarus, the country affected by much of the fallout, is planning to use the crops to suck up the radioactive strontium and caesium and make the soil fit to grow food again within decades rather than hundreds of years.
Pune The wastelands, called padik zameen in the local parlance, on the outskirts of Pune are just pieces of degraded lands that do not fulfil their life-sustaining potential for many. But not for environmentalists who for the first time have studied and located eight species of scorpions in these lands, which are rapidly being utilised for construction and other purposes.
Africa is taking the lead in creating its own biotechnology agenda, according to researchers based at South Africa's Durban University of Technology and the University of Kwazulu-Natal.
The changes undergone by physico-chemical properties of soil, profile morphology and the productivity index, as a result of bringing the barren land under Poplar plantation, were evaluated in Yamuna Nagar District of Haryana, where large chunks of land have been raised as block plantation with Poplar. The soils supporting Poplar plantations were enriched with organic carbon and nutrients.
Sirsa afforestation project gets CDM certification eight remote villages of Haryana have entered the global carbon market. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (unfccc) registered an afforestation project on the degraded land of these villages as the world
This paper deals with legal, administrative, social and policy aspects of constraints for people's participation in wastelands afforestation programme. The present study was conducted in three categories of villages of Uttar Pradesh.
