Small-scale forest-based processing enterprises comprise an important, but neglected, part of the forestry and forest industries sector. They process a large part of the raw materials from the forest and supply some of the main markets for forest products, in particular in the rural…

The objective of this Soils Bulletin is to promote the use of locally available organic materials to increase soil organic matter content for improvement of soil fertility, and as a sources of plant nutrients in conjunction with mineral fertilizers. This manual is written for all those…

This paper examines the decline of common property resources in the arid zone of Rajasthan in India and the factors underlying the decline.The article concludes that:well-intentioned public programmes like land reformcan deprive a region of its comparative advantage in a key economic activity (…

During the past two decades there has been increasing concern that the development strategies of the 1950s and 1960s would neither eliminate nor even greatly reduce poverty even as the pervasive nature of that poverty became more widely recognized. This increase in concern conincided with the…

In his insghtfull but unfinished work, Dharm Narain drew attention to the behavior of prices as one of the important factors determining the extent of poverty in rural India. His empirical investigations, summarized in Gunvant Desai's contribution to this volume (chap. 1), provide strong…

Shifting cultivation, under its diverse forms of slash and burn system, is a traditional method of cultivating tropical upland soils, mostly for subsistence purposes. This traditional system of cultivation is in ecological balance with the environment and does not irreversibly degrade the soil…