BHOPAL SEPT. 4 The President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, will visit the Torni watershed in Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh on Friday to observe the impact of watershed development.

Torni is one of the 7600 villages in the State where the Rajiv Gandhi Mission for Watershed Management is operational.

The Mission, launched in 1994 in Madhya Pradesh, has now grown to be the country's largest watershed management programme covering 34.38 lakh hectares, which is one per cent of the country's land. The second track of the Mission for community-led water harvesting was started through massive public participation in the form of "Save Water Campaign'' (Pani Roko Abhiyan) in the wake of last year's acute drought.

On the eve of the President's visit, an official spokesman told The Hindu that the Watershed Management Mission has completed work in 14.26 lakh hectares and work in remaining 20.12 lakh hectares is currently under way. Improvement in ground water level in more than 3000 villages has been one of the many positive impacts of the watershed development. The area under plantation has also increased by over 23,000 hectares and there has been a 34 per cent decrease in wasteland in villages covered by the Mission. Due to water conservation, the irrigated area in the villages has seen an increase of 59 per cent. Compared to the pre-Mission period, the acreage under rabi and kharif crops has now gone up by 16 per cent and 21 per cent respectively.

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New Delhi Sept. 4. Despite stiff resistance from powerful blocks, India and other developing countries defeated attempts to impose trade barriers and other restrictions on them at the World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in South Africa. The industrialised countries were determined on imposing trade barriers against the developing countries in some form or the other.

"We succeeded in deleting the eco-labelling criteria from the text of declaration since it could have been misused against us," the Environment and Forests Minister, T.R. Baalu, who led the Indian delegation, told PTI on his return here today.

He said that the summit, taking place 10 years after the Rio Earth meet, was very important because the developing countries had a lot at stake.

Asserting that environment was a common global concern and not exclusive to individual countries, he said the success of global efforts in this regard was directly related to the right kind of international cooperation, in which developed countries have to help the developing ones with financial and technical resources.

Common but differentiated responsibility was the main concern for India and other members of the G-77.

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