The Supreme Court has instructed several mining enterprises based in Anantpur district of Andhra Pradesh — including one, the Obulapuram Mining Company, that is associated with the powerful Reddy brothers of Karnataka — to stop operations while investigations are conducted into whether they are mining in areas which they aren’t supposed to touch. This is a welcome check on the Reddy brothers, who must have begun to think of themselves...

Vedanta Aluminium has violated forest conservation guidelines and failed to follow the Forest Rights Act in letter and in spirit at a proposed bauxite mine project in the Niyamgiri Hills of Orissa, according to a report submitted by a three-member team to the Union Environment and Forests Ministry. Following allegations about the project earlier this year, the Ministry constituted the team — with a forestry official, a former government wildlife official...

Firm asks farmers to switch to its second-generation product to delay resistance further  Pink bollworm resistant to pest-killing protein of Bt cotton in four districts Monsanto's advice ridiculous, say scientists For the first time anywhere in the world, biotech agriculture giant Monsanto has admitted that insects have developed resistance to its Bt cotton crop. Field monitoring in parts of Gujarat has discovered that the Bt crop is no longer effective against the...

Pushed to a corner by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh’s peremptory freeze on Bt brinjal, the UPA government took the first step of finding a way out. And it needed the authority of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to do that. In a clear enunciation of the government’s policy on GM crops — a policy that got clouded by Ramesh’s rhetoric — the Prime Minister underlined the importance of biotechnology in productivity...

Vedanta Resources is under fire from heaven and earth, and even Hollywood has been asked to join in. Tribal rights campaigner Survival International has appealed to Avatar director James Cameron, through an advertisement in US entertainment magazine Variety, to help it stop the company from mining for bauxite in an Orissa forest. The ad drew parallels between the Na’vi tribe in Avatar, who try to stop humans from mining under their sacred...