Build-up of different types of resistance could make it more difficult to manage the plants using herbicides. Transgenes present in 80 per cent of wild canola found by study Authorities had anticipated the existence of GM “volunteers” Researchers in the U.S. have found new evidence that genetically modified crop plants can survive and thrive in the wild, possibly for decades. A University of Arkansas team surveyed countryside in North Dakota for canola. Transgenes were...

A higher order of political leadership, a transparent and accountable bureaucracy and activist citizen forums are imperative for effectively addressing hunger and poverty in India, N.R. Narayana Murthy, chairman and chief mentor of Infosys Technologies, said on Sunday. Addressing a policy forum at the international conference on “Eliminating hunger and poverty” hosted by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Mr. Murthy said the dark side of India's growth story had been...

Complexity and unsolved problems are at the very heart of the sustainability challenge, and at the very heart of M.S. Swaminathan's thinking and essays. In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus offered the piercing insight that geometric population growth would inevitably outstrip food production, leaving society destitute and hungry. Since that time, our optimism of beating the “Malthusian curse” has waxed and waned. Few people in modern history have done more to help...

Food rights activists demand universalisation and decentralisation of PDS A large number of food rights activists staged a protest outside the godown of the Food Corporation of India in Rourkela on Sunday demanding equitable distribution of food grains and universalisation and decentralisation of the public distribution system (PDS). More than 1,500 activists, academicians and those involved in various people's movements participated in the agitation against the rotting of food grains in...

Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it — Max Frisch, Swiss novelist and playwright Why do MNCs excite extreme emotions in India ? If you take any one of them from banks to pharma and chemicals to defence and aerospace, they are all clubbed together with the “usual suspects” who do more harm than good despite all the good intentions they might have had....