Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) is organizing a webinar as a part of the successful implementation of Pre-Monsoon Dry sowing in Andhra Pradesh. This initiative has started as a pilot in Anantapuram district, a semi-arid region of Andhra Pradesh to demonstrate the concept of harnessing the water vapor from...

Crop establishment is often poor in the semiarid tropics. However, good crop stand establishment is essential for the efficient use of water and light, and a uniform stand is a pre-requisite for cropping success. Seeds that germinate quickly produce viable seedlings that are not dependent on rapidly declining moisture in...

Commercial, industrialised agriculture has made women farmers invisible in much of the Global South. India is no exception. This is changing with India’s Zero Budget Natural Farming practices (now more often referred to as Community Managed Natural Farming), which are being used by nearly a million smallholder farmers. Women, with little...

Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN), a reputed national level Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), working in eight states of western, central and eastern India, is promoting goat-rearing through women self-help groups in four of its programme states: Rajasthan, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha. PRADAN’s goat rearing interventions in Odisha are concentrated...

Against the backdrop of the need to operationalize the SSF Guidelines in a participatory manner, the role of the local governance system of India cannot be overemphasized. As a complement to the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (CCRF), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has developed the...

Low income farmers in semi-arid tropics, such as in the low rainfall areas of southern India traditionally combine different activities to diversify livelihoods so as to reduce the impact of natural hazards like drought. The Acacia Leucophoea and Cenchrus Ciliaris sylvi-pastoral system is an integrated sylvi-pastoral farming system that provides...

The centralized plant breeding techniques of the green revolution have yielded good results in more favourable agricultural environments. However, most low-resource farmers in marginal areas have not benefited from these varieties. As an alternative to centralized breeding, farmer participatory approaches using Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS) and Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB)...

The Roundup includes recent publications, films added to our Documentation centre, meetings coming up, websites  which are important to small-scale fisheries, flashback of editorial from old issues of samudra report related to the theme  and Endquote from the world of literature related to fisheries. 

If managed sensibly, inland water bodies can go a long way to provide India with a sustainable future and food security for its population. Fish production in India registered a remarkable 16-fold increase during the last six decades to reach 12.59 mn tonnes (MT) in 2017-18, propelling the country to the...

Farming is the bedrock of India’s economy—43 per cent of its population are employed in agriculture. Yet, paradoxically, around 60 per cent of India’s people is likely to experience severe food shortages by 2050. Climate change impacts—including crop losses due to global heating—unregulated use of fertilizers and pesticides leading that degrade the soils,...

The centralized plant breeding techniques of the green revolution have yielded good results in more favourable agricultural environments. However, most low-resource farmers in marginal areas have not benefited from these varieties. As an alternative to centralized breeding, farmer participatory approaches using Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS) and Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB)...

A prominent leader of India’s fishworkers succumbed to COVID-19 on 8 October. T Peter was a committed organizer and a practical leader with exemplary political acumen. T Peter, the General Secretary of the National Fishworkers Forum (NFF), India, passed away on 8 October, 2020. About a week earlier, on 2 October,...

Farmers’ participatory varietal evaluation of wheat and rice was conducted for three consecutive years from 1999 to 2002, in the Punjab, India. Farmers adopted new varieties that better met their needs and enabled them to break their monoculture dependence. They also made use of seed priming and zero tillage, a...

Using participatory plant breeding, poor and marginal farmers in Eastern India, who previously grew old and low yielding land races, produced several new varieties of upland rice. Self-help groups produced truthful seed of these rice varieties, with production rising from 39 in 2002-2003 to 81 t in 2003-2004. It was...

Municipal solid waste (MSW) can be a valuable fertilizer for peri-urban farmers in India. An integrated approach to urban waste management, currently absent, is needed to improve its use, to include segregation of waste materials (removal of plastic and glass). Thus halting the decline in quality and its management and...

India’s growing population represents 40 percent of the world’s absolute poor. Its agricultural sector accounts for nearly one third of the country’s GDP and occupies two thirds of the workforce. With an increasing food demand and some of its regions, like the eastern plateau region, receiving very little rainfall, aquaculture...

Crop establishment is often poor in the semiarid tropics. However, good crop stand establishment is essential for the efficient use of water and light, and a uniform stand is a pre-requisite for cropping success. Seeds that germinate quickly produce viable seedlings that are not dependent on rapidly declining moisture in...

The centralized plant breeding techniques of the green revolution have yielded good results in more favourable agricultural environments. However, most low-resource farmers in marginal areas have not benefited from these varieties. As an alternative to centralized breeding, farmer participatory approaches using Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS) and Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB)...

Using participatory plant breeding, poor and marginal farmers in Eastern India, who previously grew old and low yielding land races, produced several new varieties of upland rice. Self-help groups produced truthful seed of these rice varieties, with production rising from 39 in 2002-2003 to 81 t in 2003-2004. It was...

The Bharatiya Agro Industries Foundation (BAIF), is a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) that works across 60 000 villages in 16 states of India, reaching out to over 4.5 million farmers. In BAIF’s programme area in the Dharwad district of India, high mortality among goat kids in the rainy season was reported...