In a major setback to the encroachers, the district administration has begun reclaiming land worth hundreds of crores of rupees from different areas of the city. Buildings constructed illegally on Agricultural land along National Highway 8 were razed on Monday, while notices were issued to other encroachers. According to district administration, hundreds of acres of land given for Agricultural purpose was misused by the owners and sold off illegally. The...

The government’s subtle, but significant, move to divest the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) of its job of approving the genetically modified (GM) products and convert it into merely a GM appraisal body has taken the biotechnology sector by surprise. The Gazette notification to this effect replaces the word “approval” in the committee’s nomenclature with “appraisal”, thus making it the “Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee”. One obvious reason for doing so...

With Europe and Gulf countries, putting in place stringent safety norms for ensuring that pesticide residue in Agricultural crops remain below prescribed limits, basmati (aromatic rice) exporters from India have urged the Union agriculture ministry to ensure that farmers use less pesticide. Europe and Gulf nations are main export destinations for Indian basmati rice. In a letter to agriculture ministry, Vijay Setia, president, All India Rice Exporters’ Association has said that some...

Suffering from extreme poverty and male oppression, the women of Darkali village in Madhya Pradesh, India, are now able to feed their families through employment under the MGNREGS. The wages obtained under the Scheme help them augment the family resource base. Jashmabai is working under the punishing sun on an earthen dam in her village of Darkali, in Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district, being built under the government-funded Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

The 2010 Seeds Bill that has been introduced in Parliament does address some of the major concerns in the aborted 2004 version, but strangely a number of important correctives – on regulation, consistency and punishment – that had been incorporated in the 2008 version (which lapsed in 2009) have now been modified or dropped altogether. What forces are pushing the government to act against the interests of India’s farmers? The third...