Bunga took the sukhomajri story forward The first village to follow Sukhomajri's development model was Bunga, just 30 km away in Haryana's Panchkula district (see timeline: Divergent trajectories).

Government must facilitate, not control The experiences of Sukhomajri and Bunga have a lesson: given the right conditions, external and internal, villages can be self-sustaining. But their inherent

Some innovations change lives. A favourite of mine is the village milk collection system, a cooperative model. There s a dairy in the village, people bring in milk, the dairy in

the Union budget for 2007-08 is big on illusions, small on vision. Despite the hype about its tilt towards the agriculture sector, the budget has failed to put together a package to bail out the

who should fund the National Rainfed Area Authority (nraa)? The issue remained unresolved even after the first meeting of the authority ended in Delhi in January this year. Set up in November

Call it is one of the unknown Indian ironies. Over many years, the Indian state, through its public irrigation agencies, has systematically taken over the management of surface water systems. It has

Urban India is beginning to explode. The question is if our cities will be able to manage this growth or will they just burst at the seams? The reason I ask this is because we still don t have a clue

Cheap option to treat effluent

A recent letter from a reader has disturbed me enormously. B P Radhakrishna, president of the Geological Society of India, in response to a story in Down To Earth about how drought was affecting

organic reservoir: Spreading an ultra-thin layer of organic molecules on the surface of reservoirs could prevent millions of cubic metres of water evaporating each year, according to Flexible

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