Block vehicular and railway traffic across Punjab, demand relaxation of paddy procurement norms Various factions of the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) and organisations of landless labourers blocked the railway traffic at Moga and ten other locations in Punjab on Friday. They also halted the vehicular traffic on many highways, demanding relaxation in the procurement norms of paddy. The protesters claimed that adverse weather conditions had affected the quality of grains, and said...

Even as recent media reports caution that most fruits and vegetables are largely unfit for human consumption due to their high chemical content, pesticides continue to be used recklessly in the fields of Punjab. The ‘Granary of India’ constitutes 2.5 per cent of the total agricultural land in India, but consumes more than 18 per cent of the total pesticides used in India. Within the state the worst affected is the southwestern...

Farmers across the southwest belt of Haryana and northern Rajasthan have this year sown cotton on a large scale moving away from paddy, the traditional crop in this region. Due to the unavailability of canal water in certain areas in this region, farmers have also moved from sowing Bt cotton to desi (local) cotton which requires less water. The trend has largely been seen in the districts of Fatehabad, Bhiwani,...

After discovery of high levels of uranium in hair samples of a large number of mentally retarded children in Punjab’s Malwa region last year, another study suggests Punjab has become a hotspot of environmental toxicity of multiple types. While a top German laboratory revealed that hair samples of 80% of 149 neurologically-disabled children, mainly from Malwa region, had high levels of uranium, a study by Greenpeace suggested that all the...