Desertification is a significant global ecological problem. It is also common in many areas in the Theni district. The study villages in the Theni district are affected by the aeolian sand deposition, forming linear dunes along the Western Ghats. They have been so for hundreds of years. Arable/agricultural land has been covered by dunes for an area of 12,000 ha. There are even now high dunes stretching for almost 20-25 km all along the Western Ghats, after about 40 per cent of the area has been sand quarried in the last several years. The villages get very low rainfall of about 650 mm to 750 mm a year. Purpose of the Study. The purpose of the study is to look at what has happened after sand quarrying/mining of the area by the human agency and how the reclaimed areas used, particularly for small-scale agriculture, in the last several years. The Objectives of the Study. The objectives of the study are: (1) To examine the process of land reclamation in the study area through sand mining from the dunes and sand encroached areas; and (2) To analyse the use of reclaimed land for agriculture, particularly by the marginal and small farmers of the study villages. Land Reclamation and Agriculture of the Study Area. Land reclamation hereabouts has been happening for several years, but it has been primarily an individual effort. Some farmers have decided either on their own or the advice of someone or in some cases they have simply followed others. Lands of considerable extent have been reclaimed from the sands in the villages of Sillamarathupatti and Silamalai, which are our current focus. The paper speaks about the impacts of land reclamation on the agriculture of the villages from a questionnaire survey.

Achieving inclusive growth through micro finance will be a catalyst for accelerating the pace of economic growth with equity. NABARD has intensified its efforts for roping in new partners for promotion and bank linkage in regions where the growth of groups has not been commensurate with potential. Priority has been assigned to awareness building and for identification of NGOs and other partners in 13 priority states, which account for 70 per cent of rural poor in the country. The phenomenal growth rate of micro finance sector, especially the SHG bank linkage programme has posed number of issues and challenges which need immediate attention. There is a huge amount of regional variation in both credit deepening and credit widening, though a lot of measures are being implemented by NABARD through various agencies. This indicates that there is still a long way to go for the SHG movement and also for NABARD to attain the goal of socio-economic empowerment and also inclusive growth in the country

Savings and investment are key requirements for growth and development. Savings and investment have been considered as two critical macro-economic variables with microeconomic foundations for achieving price stability and promoting employment opportunities thereby contributing to sustainable economic growth. Since independence Indian economy has been moved from a moderate growth path of 1950-1980 to a higher growth trajectory since 1980s. Over the last four decades, Indian economy has emerged as one of the fastest growing economies of the world. This paper considers savings, investment and economic growth for India using annual time series data for the period 1991/92 to 2017/18. The study make use of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to test for cointegration and Error correction based Granger causality analysis for investigate the causality between the variables. Data for Gross Domestic Savings (GDS) and Gross Domestic Investment (GDI) were taken from the National Accounts Statistics of India and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was taken Reserve Bank of India. The study finds that saving explicitly determines investment in both the short and long runs and there is no evidence is found to support t

Emerging Market Economies (EMDE) are facing challenges and the performance of the Large Emerging Market (LME) economies are also with issues of concern and makes global development a fix. The global slowdown and financial crisis bring uneven development. Adding to this, epidemics like COVID-2019 also pushed the world economies down by at least 0.04 percent with its cascading effects to come in the future. The trade positions in the EMDE regions were weak due to uncertainties and lower demand for commodities. The financial markets were in stress, investment has reduced, lower capital, low productivity, lesser business climate etc., in the EDMEs. The real GDP of EDMEs is expected to grow an average of 6.2 percent during 2017-21 and it is 0.3 percent lower than 2016 position. Advanced economies perform comparatively lower in the world output. The output of Emerging and Developing Asian countries output was 6.6 percent in 2017 and it declined to 6.4 percent in 2019