Sheetal Patil

• MA Econ
• Lead at Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS)

This commentary offers a critical engagement with the Environment–Health Nexus Policy Guide released by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) in 2022–23. We find that it strikes a hitherto-elusive balance between concerns centred on human...

Cities are exposed to and concentrate heat. Indian cities are particularly at risk with terrifying projections of extreme heat, especially for vulnerable populations. Recognising this growing heat risk, Indian cities have been frontrunners in heat action planning, experimenting with a range of actions, typically through city-level ‘Heat Action Plan...

Agricultural commodity expansion into natural and semi-natural ecosystems in Asia is a multi-dimensional sustainability challenge posing a threat to natural and human capital. At the symposium pertaining to agricultural commodity landscapes organized at the 59th meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, we aimed to identify...

Food systems of indigenous people across the world have developed within the confluence of forests, biodiversity, and seasonal crops. However, due to multiple socio-economic, cultural, ecological and political changes, this relationship has evolved over time. This has not only impacted traditional food systems; we hypothesize that it has also shift...

Ongoing urbanisation offers opportunities to reimagine how cities can restore and strengthen human-nature relationships while contributing to urban sustainability. Focusing on activities around growing food as a key space to examine solutions, the ‘Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture as Green Infrastructure’ (UP-AGrI) project explored the impacts of g...

Urban and peri-urban agriculture as green infrastructure (UP-AGrI), a three-year research project, examines the implications of urban agriculture on human well-being and urban sustainability. The project draws on research in Tanzania and India. The three broad project objectives are: • To examine the impacts of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UP...

We argue that active recognition of injustices in climate action is a crucial step towards designing equitable and fair responses to climate change. Using examples of projects on renewable energy, afforestation and coastal embankments, we briefly describe how the unintended negative health impacts of these interventions are mediated through agricul...

In a homogenized imagination of human aspirations, development interventions replicate popular models, including intensive farming in Adivasi landscapes. In the process, they try to sedentarise and individualize Adivasi communities living in the forest peripheries. Even as modernization remains an elusive target in most of the tribal belts, ethnic...

Despite considerable interest in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) in recent decades, its contributions to urban sustainability and human wellbeing remain contested. This systematic literature review examines the geographical landscape of the peer-reviewed literature on UPA and assesses its reported outcomes on sustainability and wellbeing. Fo...

To capture the overall dynamics of urbanisation in the research space of FOR2432, this study tracks the land cover changes within the two transects across the rural–urban interface of Bengaluru. It covers a retrospective period of almost three decades, with observations in 1992, 2000, 2011, and 2016, based on Landsat and Sentinel satellite images,...

Globally, food systems have become increasingly fragile. Environmental and social changes as well as farming practices have largely contributed to this transformation. Health and nutritional outcomes have felt the effect of this transformation most acutely. Traditional food systems, which have ensured food and nutritional security of communities fo...

Urbanisation, while offering marketing opportunities, inflicts considerable impacts on ecology, health, and livelihoods in the peri-urban farming areas. The city demands perishable products that need input intensive farming. In parallel, it also discharges domestic sewage and industrial effluents into peri-urban water bodies. The availability of wa...

India’s mid-day meal scheme is the largest scheme of its type globally. To reap its full benefit, the government needs to focus on improving its quality and nutritional value, and thereby enhance its impact. In addition, the outreach of nutritional support programs that enhance household availability of food, such as the Public Distribution System,...

Abstract: The Mid-Day Meal (MDM) is an important nutrition-specific intervention of the Government of India, providing a specified quantum of food and calories for children in primary schools across the country. The New Education Policy (2020) reiterates the importance of ensuring that childhood flourishing is not impeded by classroom hunger. There...

Based on a household survey among a sample of small farmers from different parts of Karnataka who had migrated to various urban areas of the state, this chapter maps characteristics of farmer migrants, to understand the direct and indirect drivers behind farmers’ decision to migrate and to examine how they fare with a switch in occupation and locat...

Cities are known for disparity in income, in contrast to disparity based on caste and land in rural villages. Disparity in any two or all the three axes (class-caste-land) may converge or combine with other axes of power and agency (political, educational or the environmental). Small towns are supposed to be less unequal spaces than big cities or r...

In any fast-growing economy, it is common to attribute agrarian opportunities to expanding and emerging cities as described in Satterthwaite et al. (2010). Nevertheless, the opportunities arising from urbanisation come along with huge demands placed on the production landscape. If the current pattern of urban consumption continues, food production...

With reasonably accessible transportation, infrastructure and communication networks, hardly any area or community remains totally disconnected from the globalised urbanised world. However, regions distant from the centre of political and commercial power continue to be countrysides, unlike the immediate peripheries of metropolitan cities or interm...

Having discussed the agrarian society and ecology from a historical perspective in the previous chapter, we now examine the current interface of farming and urbanisation. Chapter 1 introduced Indian peasantry at the time of urbanisation. This chapter elaborates on that introduction, focusing on the state of Karnataka.

Agrarian urbanism is intuitively comprised of economic and demographic dynamism around marketing as well as processing of agricultural products farmed in the vicinity. This caters to a stable yet dynamic intertwined rural–urban relationship. Agrarian urbanism here refers to a multi-activity, multi-product economy originating in the family farms of...

This chapter presents glimpses of the treatment of smallholders in noted agrarian literature. As the notion of the smallholder is multi-dimensional, multi-scalar and also multi-regional, the volume of published work is extensive. Consequently, categorising this body of work is challenging. Yet, we have tried to organise relevant and well known stud...

Recognising the gaps prevalent in the existing agrarian frameworks in general and the lack of focus on smallholders in particular, this study explores the dynamics of family farms in urbanising India, specifically in the southern State of Karnataka. The intention is to understand small farmer as an identity and small farming as a livelihood option,...

Small and marginal farmers seem to be trapped in a precarious persistence between the city slums and empty villages. The study began by placing the precariousness of a smallholder family farm at the centre and considering various schools of thoughts on peasants, family farms and agriculturists, before using these terms interchangeably. This study s...

‘Peasant’ has been a favourite, if not romantic, topic of academic explorations. The boundaries that peasantry shared with others in society were stark and amenable to dichotomous treatments of deprivation and exploitation. Closely intertwined, nature and peasant were both exploited by landlords and industries. Surging economies distanced themselve...

Agriculture being spatially and temporally sandwiched between natural landscapes and urban spaces, reflects the region’s nature-society dynamics at any point in time. The study sites mentioned in the previous chapter can be distinguished by their agro-ecology and socio-political history. Study villages in Bengaluru, Ramanagara and Mandya districts...

Adaptive Skilling through Action Research

This book takes readers on a journey through the evolution of agricultural communities in southern India, from their historical roots to the recent global neo-liberal era. It offers insights into a unique combination of themes, with a particular focus on agrarian change and urbanisation, specifically in the state of Karnataka where both aspects are...

Rural-urban interfaces worldwide are increasingly witnessing massive transformations in the structure, functions, and services of complex ecosystems of these zones. An attempt has been made to understand the transitions triggered by urbanisation in the peri-urban agricultural systems of Bengaluru. Using a combination of land-use change analysis and...

Small farm holders in India face multifold challenges to sustain their livelihoods. Rapid urbanization, increasing cost of cultivation, degraded natural resources, low productivity, and price uncertainties are major challenges that Indian farmers in general and small and marginal ones, in particular, face today. Based on a policy change in the stat...

The divergence between economic growth and equality in the Indian context can be attributed to the disconnect between the macroeconomy and regional rural economies that host small landholdings. Comparing the agrarian peripheries of two distinct capital-accumulating urban areas in Karnataka, a decipherable pattern in distributional outcomes, food an...

‘Voices from the margins’ brings a small subset of narratives on vulnerability from a transitioning rural Karnataka.

‘Voices from the margins’ brings a small subset of narratives on vulnerability from a transitioning rural Karnataka.

Rural collectives and self-help groups (SHGs) have emerged as an important social engineering tool for the process of transforming and improving the livelihoods of the underprivileged. Originally conceived as organisations to promote financial sustainability, these have evolved over the years to cater to a number of objectives including social orga...

Poverty reduction measures targeted at rural communities include social welfare schemes, safety nets (public distribution systems, reservation in jobs and education, primary health, etc.) and disaster relief packages (e.g. tsunami and drought relief and Vidarbha package for farmers in distress). Several authors have also discussed the role of bette...

Karnataka is one of the south-western Indian states where agrarian distress as a major problem. Crop yields have been stagnant in the last decade, and coupled with increased input costs, this has led to reduced incomes and debts. There is an urgent need to study options to improve the sustainability of farming systems in Karnataka. One adopted stra...

The forests that India is renowned for are also the source of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) that have several important household and commercial uses. Collecting NTFPs is a livelihood option for lakhs of poor households that live on the fringes of these forests, aspect that was well illustrated in the case of Natham, Kanakapura and Mudumalai i...

Over 56% of the population of Karnataka state in India depends on agriculture for its livelihood. A majority of these are small and marginal farmers, with land under 2 ha, responsible for nearly half the food production in the state. The increasing rate of farmers’ suicides in the state is reportedly fuelled among others, by increasing input costs,...

The classical approach of assessing sustainability with respect to its three underlying pillars, ecological, economic, and social, is adopted in this paper, with an added emphasis on estimating the simultaneous effects of each pillar on the other two. The paper assesses the impact of policy-driven changes in cultivation practices in five districts...

Sustainable management of natural resources in small scale agriculture is a less debated issue, especially its governance aspects. Focusing on selected villages where a policy towards sustainable agriculture has been introduced in Karnataka -a state showing signs of agrarian distress; the paper discusses the governance aspects in natural resources...

With the advent of the Green Revolution in India, yields increased but agricultural growth has since been stagnating and soil and water quality have been declining. These problems, coupled with rising input costs and increasing debt often culminate in farmers’ suicides; an increasing phenomenon in the state of Karnataka. Certain recent agricultural...

What do different stakeholders think of the changing trends in agricultural practices and related policies?We answer this and related questions with respect to Karnataka, an Indian state showing signs of agrarian distress. Using the participatory impact assessment (PIA) method involving farmers, researchers and voluntary workers, we assess the impa...

Forests provide wide range of ecosystem services and thereby help communities to derive many direct and indirect benefits. Gross and net direct benefit that the community derives from Gundal canal is an aggregate of respective gross and net benefits from crop and fodder. Opportunity cost of family-labor in cultivation is calculated as the foregone...