Browsing by Author "Puneet Sharma"

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Enabling Environment for Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Critical Review of Climate Smart Practices from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa
(Technoscience Publications, 2025) Arpita Ghosh; Puneet Sharma; Arnab Mondal; Surajit Mondal
In South Asian and Sub-Saharan African nations, climate change offers numerous hurdles to growth and development. These regions are susceptible to climate change due to their vast population reliance on agriculture, high demand for natural resources, and comparatively limited strategies for coping. Reduced food grain yields, crop losses, feed scarcity, lack of potable water for livestock during the summer, forceful animal migrations, and severe losses in the poultry and fishery industries have all been documented, posing a threat to the lives of the rural poor. As global food security and agricultural productivity become increasingly vulnerable, the focus has shifted towards adopting climate-smart agricultural practices and techniques. The present study discussed the need to identify and prioritize regionally evolving climate-smart farming practices and the enabling environment required for CSA uptake. The popular CSA practices in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are crop rotation, cultivation of drought/flood-tolerant crops, legume intercropping, changing planting dates, rainwater harvesting, agroforestry, micro-irrigation technologies, minimum tillage, and integrated crop-livestock farming. A solid institutional structure, policy environment, infrastructure, agricultural insurance, climate information services, and gender and social inclusion provide the required enabling environment to alleviate farmer issues, lower CSA adoption obstacles, and improve operational sustainability. Highlights of the study are: This study examines how climate-smart farming practices are evolving in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. We used a systematic approach to categorize and characterize agricultural adaptation alternatives to climate change. Our specific goals are to gain knowledge of the CSA adoption-enabling environments and the climate-smart agriculture practices employed in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. © 2025 by the authors.
Socio-economic-environmental challenges at himachal villages: findings from five unnat bharat abhiyan adopted villages
(Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH, 2024) Arpita Ghosh; Puneet Sharma; Devika Vashisht; Parul Malik; Arnab Mondal; Surajit Mondal
This research pinpoints the primary socio-economic issues and inherent circumstances of rural development in Himachal Pradesh, India. It provides a critical analysis of 289 households based on the surveys conducted in 5 villages of Sirmaur district, adopted under the UBA (‘Unnat Bharat Abhiyan’, transl. ‘Developed India initiative’). This study highlights and evaluates the significant socio-economic concerns and rural development challenges based on key factors such as population, education, employment, rural development schemes, livestock assets, property distribution, essential services and transport connectivity. The findings from this study are crucial for identifying priority areas for community capacity building and sustainable rural development including literacy rates, healthcare, and agricultural products. The study emphasizes the prudent use of existing resources and the maximisation of benefits from centrally and state-sponsored schemes for the comprehensive development of the adopted villages under UBA. Although the current initiative is based on the UBA-adopted villages, it may be applied to other rural villages of Himalayan states. This article highlights inter-variations in socio-economic issues such as healthcare, sanitation, waste management, unsustainable agriculture methods, drug misuse, unemployment, and sanitation in the UBA adopted villages in the Sirmaur District, Himachal Pradesh, India. © 2024, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.