-Down to Earth An ecologist has been guarding seeds of more than 750 rare rice varieties for over a decade Lit by a kerosene lamp, the two-room hut just outside a sleepy hamlet in Odisha’s Rayagada district can easily pass off as any other farmer’s house in this tribal region. Step inside it, and one is taken aback by the hundreds of earthen pots labelled with coded stickers stacked in a corner...

-Down to Earth Rice cultivation has led to waterlogging and soil Salinity in Haryana’s Jhajjar district CASTE-BASED khap panchayats of Haryana are usually in the news for passing regressive and, often, controversial orders in the name of honouring social customs. But this year in January, the Jhakkar khap panchayat of Jhajjar district gave a rather unusual order in the larger interest of the farming community. It ordered that all the 36...

-IPS News Environmental activists are cautiously optimistic that a call by a court-appointed technical committee for a ten-year moratorium on open field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops will shelve plans to introduce bio-engineered foods in this largely agricultural country. “We are now waiting to see whether the Supreme Court will accept the recommendations of its own committee at the next hearing on Oct. 29,” said Devinder Sharma, chairman of the Forum...

-Outlook Could scientists have got the impacts of climate change on food supply wildly wrong? I believe we might have made a mistake: a mistake whose consequences, if I am right, would be hard to overstate. I think the forecasts for world food production could be entirely wrong. Food prices are rising again, partly because of the damage done to crops in the northern hemisphere by ferocious weather. In the US, Russia...

A survey of 71 cities across the country conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has shown that officially 82 per cent of all the water that municipalities of these cities supply comes from surface water resources, and the rest comes from groundwater resources. But of these 71 cities, 11 depend almost completely on groundwater for public water supply. In the remaining, agencies supply water from surface sources by...