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E-pov News:     May - June 2008 Environment-poverty (E-pov) News is a monthly news bulletin of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)'s Natural Resource Management and Livelihood unit. This provocative bulletin brings you the latest developments on environment, poverty and governance in India and South Asia. It also features community initiatives on livelihood security. The newsletter regularly updates on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) on its development effectiveness. It intends to be a platform for serious dialogue. We invite you to actively participate in this initiative by alerting us to new developments and research on the poverty-environment interface and on NREGA.
Inside	Policy Watch: Himachal Pradesh increases forest cover through carbon credits In Focus: Roman Blunder NREGA Updates: Wages to be paid through Banks and Post offices Resources: Rising Food Prices, Drivers and Implications for Development Down To Earth: Read latest stories on poverty and environment
Policy Watch	Himachal Pradesh increases forest cover through carbon credits Himachal Pradesh state forest department will soon finalise the mechanism for making payments to farmers under the carbon credit scheme for raising forests on private and community land, as part of the World Bank-funded Mid-Himalayan Watershed Development Project. Draft policy on carbon credits ready Himachal Pradesh has come out with a draft policy on carbon credits - focusing on effective environment management strategies, clean development mechanism (CDM) and steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the state. The policy, prepared by the state’s Department of Environment and Scientific Technologies, would be finalised by December 2008.Under the draft policy, the potential areas for earning carbon credits are energy efficiency and conservation, renewable energy, gas, transport, industry, afforestation and land restoration. India plans to spend US $ 2.4 billion on rejuvenating forestland India plans to spend 100 billion rupees (US $ 2.4 billion) on rejuvenating three million hectares of degraded forests to increase the green cover and soak up emissions. According to the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, the government proposes to revive more than six million hectares of degraded forests in two phases over the next 10 years. The first phase envisages planting trees over three million hectares starting 2008. New CRRI varieties to contain price rise The Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI) has introduced five new high-yielding rice varieties in Orissa to assist in tiding over the food crisis. The seeds have been submitted to the Centre and the formal notification of the varieties is expected. Orissa languishes very low on production parameters with yield of below one tonne. According to the CRRI scientists, the new varieties have been developed in consonance with the different ecologies of the state – from irrigated to rainfed and uplands to low lands. Bamboo is grass and not tree, says CII joint study A recent joint study titled ‘Industrialisation of bamboo sector in India’ by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the India Development Foundation states that bamboo is a grass. The study suggests that various restrictions on bamboo’s harvest, transit and trade should be removed thus, encouraging growth on private lands. 17,000 forest fires every year, but lack of any reliable database India reports more than 17,000 cases of forest fire annually. But, the Centre is yet to establish a reliable database to determine spatial and temporal patterns of fire occurrence. These are crucial in identifying sensitive areas and periods for forest fire. Majority of the forest fire cases are reported during the months of February till May. Of the total percentage of forest area in the country, 54.7 per cent is prone to fire, which damages more than a million hectare of forest annually and economic loss about Rs 440 crores. Plantations, tree canopy included in definition The 2007-08 State of the Forest Report states that the forest cover is around 20 per cent of the land in the country, 3 per cent less than the area under the forest departments. However, the report has been criticised on the grounds of failing to make a distinction between tree cover, commercial plantations and natural forest cover. To qualify as ‘forest cover’, the Forest Survey of India (FSI) considers 10 per cent tree canopy area and a hectare of land area. Rainfed projects to be overseen by states A new set of guidelines approved by the National Rainfed Area Authority (NRAA), a nodal agency to monitor watershed projects, empowers the states to sanction and oversee the implementation of watershed projects supported by the Centre. The guidelines in affect from April 2008 are aimed at achieving better utilisation of resources and quicker implementation at the grassroots level particularly the rainfed areas. Dryland crop yield to fall up to 30 per cent Climate change-triggered temperature rise will reduce the yield of dryland crops by 8 to 30 per cent, according to the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). Dry tropics, where rainfed farming provides 60 per cent of the world's food, will be most vulnerable to climate change. Rains delay kharif pulses sowing in India Sowing operations of kharif, or summer-sown pulses, have fallen behind schedule due to deficient rainfall in main growing regions. This has increased the prices by more than nine per cent. Prices of crops like soybean have risen more than 60 per cent in the last one year. Water-proof rice to make a splash next year Farmers in India and Bangladesh will likely start commercial production of flood-tolerant rice next year giving them protection against crop losses from typhoons and heavy monsoon rains. According to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), this particular variety of rice could survive for about two weeks under water.
In Focus	Roman blunder - A high level conference on world food security At the high-level conference on world food security in Rome, representatives of 180 nations met in early June seeking a salve to a food crisis getting serious by the day. Three days later, it was clear that the good intentions did not translate into effective policy decisions to reverse the global food crisis .
NREGA Update	Assessment reports on two years of NREGA The Ministry of Rural Development has released a two-year assessment of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The report includes the performance of NREGA on various parameters such as jobs provided, assets created and success stories of the scheme’s implementation. Wages to be paid through banks and post offices The Ministry of Rural Development has asked all states and union territories to ensure payment of wages under National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) through banks and post office accounts of the NREGA workers. CAG slams Maharashtra’s employment guarantee scheme A recent Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has indicted Maharashtra’s employment guarantee scheme (EGS) for falling short on several fronts: planning, financial management, registration of labourers, selection and execution of works, payment of wages, and monitoring.
Resources	Rising Food Prices, Drivers and Implications for Development This briefing paper discusses the implications of higher prices for developing countries, before setting out a brief survey of implications for development policy, focusing in particular on humanitarian assistance, but also touching on increasing supply, helping low income countries to benefit from rising prices, scarcity issues, trade and the question of fair shares. Harnessing the healing power of nature - natural regeneration in India The northern state of Rajasthan once blanketed with forests suffered large-scale land and forest degradation since the 1970s. Timber extraction, mining, grazing and cultivation have spread unchecked, leaving the soil exposed and vulnerable to erosion. Recent community projects to restore land degraded by deforestation and overgrazing has had dramatic results in Rajasthan, enabling some of the region's poorest people to earn a living from the land once again. Combating drought in Maharashtra `Combating drought in Maharashtra’, a publication brought out for the PACS Programme discusses the water crisis experienced across the state, especially in drought prone regions like the Marathwada. Soaring food prices and the rural poor The prices of basic food commodities have increased rapidly over the past three years. IFAD has gathered information from its partners and staff on the ground on the impact of rising food prices on poor rural people. How are biofuels impacting poor people's access to land? The study examines the current and likely future impacts of the increasing spread of biofuels on access to land in producer countries, particularly for poor rural people. The study concludes that, while biofuels can be instrumental in revitalising land use and livelihoods in rural areas, these possibilities depend on security of land tenure. The lived poverty index: strongly related to measurement of political freedoms The Afrobarometer has developed an experiential measure of lived poverty called the Lived Poverty Index (LPI). It measures how frequently people go without basic necessities during the course of a year. This is a portion of the central core of the concept of poverty not captured by existing objective or subjective measures.
Latest from Down To Earth magazine
	Maharashtra revokes ban on popular lentil on may 28, the Maharashtra government issued an order revoking a 47-year-old ban on the sale of Lathyrus sativus, a pulse variety grown widely in the state’s tribal districts. Known locally as lakhodi, and as khesari, tikhadi and tiwda in parts of Nothern India, lathyrus was incriminated for a crippling motor-neuron disease of the lower limbs... Read full story A Maharashtra village revives by reviving a tank In one season, land prices in Dhangharwadi shot up from Rs 6,000-10,000 per acre (0.4 hectare) to Rs 1 lakh per acre. But people in this little village in Maharashtra’s Yavatamal district are not thinking of selling their land. For good reason. Seventy hectares (ha) of agricultural land in this village, that barely produced enough grain for three months ... Read full story NREGA activists who paid with their lives: Narayan Hareka (Orissa) A crusader who fought corruption and took up cudgels against usury and illicit liquor, Orissa’s tribal leader Narayan Hareka died a premature and mysterious death on May 9. His blood-splattered body, with the right cheek crushed and an eye hanging out of its socket, was found on the outskirts of Narayanpatna town in Koraput district, some 30 km ... Read full story NREGA activists who paid with their lives: Lalit Mehta (Jharkhand) A palm-sized cd has become the prized possession of Jagdish Mehta, the father of social activist Lalit Mehta, who was brutally murdered in Kandra jungles of Palamu district in Jharkhand on May 14. His eyes gleam as he holds the cd in his hands. It contains a record of a damning social audit of an nregs project in Chhatarpur block ... Read full story
Epov Newsletter
Environment-poverty (E-pov) News is a monthly news bulletin from the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)’s Natural Resource Management and Livelihood unit. This provocative bulletin brings you the latest developments on environment, poverty and governance in India and South Asia. It also features community initiatives on livelihood security. The newsletter regularly updates on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and its development effectiveness. E-pov News intends to be a platform for serious dialogue. We invite you to actively participate in this initiative by alerting us to new developments and research on the poverty-environment interface and on NREGA.   For comments, email: e-pov@cseindia.org
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