Recent Trends of Rural Out-migration and its Socio-economic and Environmental Impacts in Uttarakhand Himalaya <Article>

In Himalaya, the environmental constraints impose severe restrictions on the carrying capacity of natural resources as well as on the effciency of infrastructure and services. As a result, subsistence farming constitutes the main source of rural food and livelihood. Owing to constraints of subsistence economy a large proportion of youth male population out-migrates the rural areas in search of livelihood and employment creating scarcity of farm labour. As a result, large proportion of agricultural land and houses are now abandoned affecting food productivity and rural livelihood; and socioeconomic and environmental sustainability. Secondly, women have become the primary resource developers and back-bone of economy leading to feminization of mountain farming system. Women make implicit contribution towards subsistence economy and sustainability of mountain socio-ecological systems. However, women enjoy highly restricted ownership of natural resources and limited access to the opportunities of social and economic development due to skewed power relations and traditional cultural and social norms, and this further leads to feminization of poverty in mountains. Moreover, the steady depletion of natural resources and climate change have further accelerated the trends of outmigration which have enhanced women’s roles and responsibilities, and increased their workload both in farm as well as non-farm sectors rendering them more vulnerable to environmental changes, particularly climate change. Moreover, the women constitute the highest proportion of population affected by natural disasters primarily due to lack of preparedness, information and exposure. However, it was observed that the increasing trends of male out-migration not only provided stability to rural economy in terms of income through remittance, but also marginally improved women’s access to education, local institutions, resources, development opportunities, grass-root leadership, natural resource management and growing market from local to global level. These changes are not only contributing towards social, economic and political empowerment and main-streaming of rural women, but also providing them with the opportunities to involve in decision making process from family to village levels. Furthermore, women have developed critical traditional knowledge to understand, visualize and respond to environmental changes including the climate change. Nevertheless, increasing trends of outmigration and abandonment of agriculture and settlements are having severe and irreversible impacts on social quality of life. It is therefore highly imperative to improve rural livelihood and create opportunities for employment in traditional as well as non-traditional sectors in rural areas, and extend the good-practices of women’s mainstreaming across the Himalayan States of India

Environmental Changes and their Impact on Rural Water, Food, Livelihood, and Health Security in Kumaon Himalayas

Population growth and the resultant land use intensifications have been identified as major drivers of environmental changes in densely populated Middle Himalayan Ranges. Study carried out in Upper Kosi Catchment (107.94 km2), in Kumaon Himalaya, India indicated that 3.34% forests have been converted into cultivated and degraded land during last 30 years. These land use changes have not only reduced the availability of biomass manure to agriculture, but also caused severe depletion of water resources through reduced groundwater recharge. Nearly 33% natural springs have dried and as many as 61% villages have been facing great scarcity of water for drinking, sanitation as well as for crop production. As a result, food production has decreased by 25%, and livelihood opportunities in traditional forestry and agricultural sectors declined considerably. These situations are increasing the vulnerability of large rural population, particularly poor, landless and socially marginalized communities to food, livelihood and health insecurity

Urban Growth in Himalaya: Understanding the Process and Options for Sustainable Development <Article>

During recent years, urbanization has emerged as one of the important drivers of global environmental change transforming mountain regions, particularly in developing countries where the process of urban-growth has been fast but mostly unsystematic, unplanned and unregulated. Himalaya representing tectonically alive, densely populated, and one of the most marginalized mountain regions of the world has experienced rapid urban growth during last three decades. More recently, comparatively less accessible areas have also come under the process of rapid urbanization mainly owing to improved road connectivity, publicity and marketing of new tourist sites and the resultant growth of domestic as well as international tourism; development of horticulture; economic globalization and gradual shift from primary resource development practices to secondary and tertiary sectors; and due to absence of urban land use policy. Consequently, there has been tremendous increase in size, area, number and complexity of urban settlements in the Himalaya resulting into the expansion of urban processes (i.e., expansion of urban land use in surrounding agricultural zone, forests and rural environments) as well as increase in the intensity of urban land use (i.e., increase in the density of covered area, density of building, and increase in the density of population) within the towns. On the one hand, the growing urban areas in high mountain are now serving as the centres of growth by creating opportunities of employment, variety of socio-economic services and expansion of infrastructure; and contributing towards the development of their vast hinterland through trickledown effect; while on the other, the sprawling urban growth in fragile mountains has disrupted the critical ecosystem services. The speedy and unplanned urbanization has perturbed the hydrological regimes of Himalayan watersheds and reduced ground water recharge, and decreased the availability of water for drinking, sanitation and crop production; depleted forests and biodiversity; increased risks of natural hazards and disasters both in urban areas as well as in their peri-urban zones; and increased vulnerability of mountain inhabitants to water, food, livelihood and health insecurity. Moreover, climate change has stressed urban ecosystems by increasing the frequency, severity and intensity of extreme weather events. As in other parts of the world, urban growth cannot be stopped or reduced in Himalaya, but it can be steered in a more sustainable manner through an integrated urban-rural land use planning. Effective land use policies need to be evolved and implemented for the protection and conservation of forests, biodiversity, water resources and agricultural land

Assessing livelihood-ecosystem interdependencies and natural resource governance in Indian villages in the Middle Himalayas

© 2018, The Author(s). Mountains host high biological and cultural diversity, generating ecosystem services providing benefits over multiple scales but also suffering significant poverty and vulnerabilities. Case studies in two contrasting village communities in the Indian Middle Himalayas explore linkages between people and adjacent forest and river ecosystems. Interviews with local people and direct observations revealed low food availability and decreasing self-sufficiency, under the combined pressures of increasing foraging by wildlife (primarily pigs and monkeys) coupled with seasonal to permanent outmigration by younger men seeking more secure income and alternative livelihoods. Much of the income remitted by migrants to their villages was not retained locally but flowed back out of the Himalayan region through purchases of food produced and marketed in the plains. This threatens the economic viability of villages, also placing asymmetric pressures on resident female, elderly and young people who concentrate labour on local livestock production to the neglect of crop agriculture, further compounding land abandonment and wildlife foraging. Significant traditional knowledge remains, along with utilitarian, cultural and spiritual connections with the landscape. Many beneficiaries of locally produced ecosystem services are remote from village communities (particularly water flows downstream to the plains), but no recompense is paid to stewards of the forested Himalayan landscape. Although local people currently perceive high biodiversity as a constraint to agriculture and other economic activities, the Himalayan landscapes could potentially constitute an asset with appropriate institutional development through promotion of managed bioprospecting, guided ecotourism and payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes for water supply and under REDD+

Reforms, entry and productivity: Some evidence from the Indian manufacturing sector

It is now stylized that, while the impact of ownership on firm productivity is unclear, product market competition can be expected to have a positive impact on productivity, thereby making entry (or contestability of markets) desirable. Traditional research in the context of entry has explored the strategic reactions of incumbent firms when threatened by the possibility of entry. However, following De Soto (1989), there has been increasing emphasis on regulatory and institutional factors governing entry rates, especially in the context of developing countries. Using 3-digit industry level data from India, for the 1984-97 period, we examine the phenomenon of entry in the Indian context. Our empirical results suggest that during the 1980s industry level factors largely explained variations in entry rates, but that, following the economic federalism brought about by the post-1991 reforms, variations entry rates during the 1990s were explained largely by state level institutional and legacy factors. We also find evidence to suggest that, in India, entry rates were positively associated with growth in total factor productivity

Exports, Capabilities, and Industrial Policy in India

An extensive literature argues that India's manufacturing sector has underperformed, and that the country has failed to industrialize; in particular, it has failed to take advantage of its laborabundant comparative advantage. India's manufacturing sector is smaller as a share of GDP than that of East Asian countries, even after controlling for GDP per capita. Hence, its contribution to overall GDP growth is modest. Without greater participation of the secondary sector, the argument goes, the country will not be able to develop and become a modern economy. Standard arguments blame the license-permit raj, the small-scale industrial policy, and the supposedly stringent laws. All these were part of the industrial policy regime instituted after independence, which favored the heavy-machinery subsector. We show that this policy bias negatively affected the development of India's labor-intensive sector, as the country should export with comparative advantage a larger number of these products, given its income per capita. However, India's manufacturing sector is relatively well diversified and sophisticated, given also the country's income per capita. In particular, India's inroads into machinery, metals, chemicals, and other capital- and skilled labor-intensive products has allowed the country to accumulate a large number of capabilities. This positions India well to expand its exports of other sophisticated products

The Labour Market in India

This chapter outlines the salient features of the labour market in India. Firstly, there has been a large shift in the workforce from agriculture to industry and services between 1951 and 2012 with more recent data showing these trends continuing. A consequence of these changes is that productivity in agriculture, relative to overall productivity, has fallen sharply while that of services has risen dramatically. A second noteworthy feature of the Indian labour market is the low participation rate, defined as the proportion of the population aged 15–65 years (the “working age” population) that is either working or seeking employment. In particular, the low (by international standards) female participation rate, which was within the 34–37% range in the 15-year period up to 2005, has declined further and stabilised at a rate of 27%. A third feature of the Indian labour market is the preponderance of informal workers and the domination of the labour market by the unorganised sector comprising enterprises employing less than 10 workers. A fourth feature of the Indian labour market is the existence of draconian labour market regulations which constrain the freedom of employers. The last feature of the Indian labour market is government provision of jobs to the rural poor under the auspices of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)

Resource utilization pattern and rural livelihood in Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve buffer zone villages, Uttarakhand, Himalaya, India. eco.mont (Journal on Protected Mountain Areas Research)|eco.mont Vol. 1 No. 2|

Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve in Uttarakhand, Himalaya, carries a large human population that traditionally depends on protected area forests, not only to fulfil basic resource needs but also for their livelihood. Due to restricted access to forests, resource utilization patterns have changed and communities have lost their traditional livelihood. This paper aims at investigating resource utilization patterns and rural livelihoods under changed socio-economic conditions and changed availability of and access to resources. Necessary data was generated through remote sensing techniques, ground validation and mapping, observations, monitoring, and socio-economic surveys. The study revealed a decline in forests and an increase in cultivated land due to changes in resource use patterns and resultant land-use intensifications. Availability per capita of forests and pastures declined by 0.72 % and 0.27 % respectively, wool production fell by 47 %; 13 % of the people lost their livelihood from forestry and 39 % in the woollen handicraft production sector. Now, subsistence agriculture constitutes the main source of livelihood, as indicated by a 16 % increase in dependency on agriculture, despite a drastic decline in the cultivated land available per capita. Agricultural productivity is fairly low and the region faces an average annual food deficit of 93 %, leading to further intensification in agriculture and community unsustainability in the region