-Reuters SUPALI: Two years ago, Vilas Yelmar took out a 200,000 rupee ($3,610) bank loan to develop a small grape orchard in a dusty hamlet southeast of Mumbai. The bank has repeatedly asked for the loan to be repaid, but Yelmar, whose annual income has risen to 2 million rupees, has spent the money on a new sport utility vehicle and a lavish family wedding. He is one of an increasing number...
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Dr Peter Kenmore, Veteran agricultural scientist and alumnus of Harvard and Berkeley Universities interviewed by Yogesh Pawar
Veteran agricultural scientist and alumnus of Harvard and Berkeley Universities, Dr Peter Kenmore was in Mumbai for NABARD’s 30th anniversary lecture on ‘Future of Global Agriculture: Challenges and Opportunities for India.’ This United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization India representative spoke to Yogesh Pawar on the current scenario in agriculture. Some excerpts: There’s a lot of churn over GM technology in India. At a time when the country is grappling with...
More »‘53 farmers committed suicide in one year'-Ananya Dutta
On a day the Trinamool Congress celebrated the first anniversary of the announcement of the 2011 Assembly polls results, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat said here on Sunday that there has been an average of one farmer suicide every week since Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's government came to power in West Bengal. “Up to 2011 in States like West Bengal and Kerala there was no news of...
More »Why drought reigns eternal-Sunita Narain
It is mostly caused by deliberate neglect and designed failure of the way we manage water and land It’s drought time again. Nothing new in this announcement. Each year, first we have crippling droughts between December and June, and then devastating floods in the next few months. It’s a cycle of despair, which is more or less predictable. But this is not an inevitable cycle of nature we must live...
More »Moratorium on Bt Brinjal-D Bandyopadhyay
On February 9, 2010, the then Minister of Environment and Forests, Government of India, Jairam Ramesh, imposed an indefinite moratorium on the introduction of Bt Brinjal in India. It is necessary and desirable to quote the order verbatim. It reads as follows: It is my duty to adopt a cautious, precautionary based approach and impose a moratorium on the release of Bt Brinjals till such time independent scientific studies establish, to...
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