Food and Nutrition

India is the largest user of groundwater in the world. Agriculture, rural and urban domestic water supply and increasingly industries are shaping the dependency on groundwater. More importantly, in the case of India as in most of South Asia, groundwater is critical to ensure drinking water security besides being the lifeline for the livelihoods of millions of small and marginal farmers.

Evidence world over shows that small scale agricultural production does very little to deal with malnutrition and food insecurity among rural poor.

Forests are disappearing at a fast rate in India.

Agriculture uses as high as 85 percent of the available water in India of which the irrigated area accounts for nearly 48.8 percent of the 140 million hectare (mha) of agricultural land, while the remaining 51.2 percent is rainfed.

COVID-19 has unleashed one of the greatest human tragedies of the contemporary era demonstrating our fragility and has laid bare severe and systemic inequalities at all levels. It provides several lessons in the conduct of all aspects of human personality, professional, societal, and institutional lives globally.

India has seen large scale rural-urban migration of people trying to escape rural distress in the last few decades.

India is the second largest tea producer in the world, with production at 1.2 million metric tons

The Amphan cyclone has disfigured the lives of people living in the Sundarbans. Houses have been torn apart, farms have been filled with brackish water making the land unsuitable for farming and betel leaves have been destroyed. People in the Sundarbans are in a life-threatening situation with makeshift shacks to live in and no means to earn a living.

Uncertainty - the pervasive feeling that all of us have been living with from the middle of March 2020. It's the same in our partner villages in Odisha and Jharkhand. Communities we work with have been facing and overcoming uncertainties all through their lives. But this time, the crisis has put unusual stress on their abilities to cope.

As the Covid-19 pandemic was leaving deep scars around the globe, it forced governments to take measures to protect citizens and ensure food security for its people. In India, initially, it looked as if the remote rural areas would skirt the pandemic.