The five-member Empowered Committee, headed by the former Chief Justice of India A.S. Anand, at its meeting here on Monday, will examine the reports it has received from various agencies it constituted to go into the safety of the Mullaperiyar dam in Kerala. In December last, the committee conducted a spot inspection of the dam. It also heard the views of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the Centre on the issues framed...

-IANS   After fabricating Jugnu, the country's tiniest satellite launched last month, Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur graduates have now come up with a matchbox-sized device to monitor wear and tear of railway tracks and prevent derailment.  The new device is aimed at replacing a bulky, box-like contraption that is currently used by Indian Railways.  "Our device is a supplementary system for monitoring track health, making it simpler to integrate with the existing railway infrastructure,"...

Degraded soils, depleting groundwater, and chemical pesticides are playing havoc, placing agriculture in terrible distress. I haven’t forgotten that night. Sitting with a group of farmers in a village in Ludhiana district in Punjab, at the height of the Green Revolution, a farmer showed me a bag of fertiliser that he brought from the market. “Why are you showing me this bag”, I asked. “Wait”, he said, and began to open the...

About 30,000 farmers in Maharashtra are feeling cheated. The soybean seeds they had purchased from the state seed corporation, Mahabeej, failed to germinate this season. About 40,000 hectares (ha) of farms in seven districts have been affected. Mahabeej has 45 per cent share in the soy seed business in the state. The blame game Government officials and the state agriculture department blame the farmers for the crop failure. M T Gondeswar, agriculture...

In his fields, Badhia Naval Singh , a farmer tilling 8 bighas of land in the Bagli tehsil in Madhya Pradesh, has been seeing something strange for a while now. Earlier, if he pulled out a tuft of grass, he would see earthworms . "Ab woh dikhna bandh ho gaye hain (they don't show up any longer)," says the 45-yearold . Also, he says, when he ploughed earlier, the soil...