A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...
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Foreign farms in Africa bring investment and controversy
-AFP JOHANNESBURG: Foreign farms are spreading across Africa to grow food and biofuels for global markets, bringing much-needed investments but also new troubles for a continent struggling to feed itself. China, Malaysia, Singapore and Bangladesh are just some of the countries spending billions of dollars in what critics have dubbed a new "scramble for Africa", a reference to Europe's 19th century colonisation drive. But Africa holds an estimated 60 percent of the world's...
More »Far from home and quite alone
-The Hindustan Times Human migration is as old as civilisation itself but the magnitude and heterogeneity of migration have seen a phenomenal rise in the last two decades. This story of human populations moving from one end of the world to the other has another leitmotif today: a spurt in migration of women workers. According to a new report - Migration of Women Workers from South Asia to the Gulf - Indian...
More »16-53% increase in kharif MSP by govt may stoke food inflation
-The Economic Times The government has increased the minimum support price (MSP) for the kharif season in a range of 16% to 53% to motivate farmers and compensate for higher input costs but the higher purchase prices could stoke food inflation further. The Committee on Economic Affairs ( CCEA) on Thursday raised the MSP of paddy by Rs 170 per quintal and those of oilseeds like groundnut, sunflower seed and niger seed...
More »A ban on the use of crops with transgenic traits is unscientific and India needs new technologies to raise farm yields-Deepak Pental
Science and technology hold the key to developing low-input, high-output agriculture. The challenge is to use new technologies creatively and to make evidence-based decisions on the deployment of new technologies. Crop breeding is carried out to meet two broad objectives: one, to increase yields of a crop per se and, two, to protect the yield potential by developing crops resistant to diseases, pests and environmental extremes. Both yield-enhancement and yield-stabilisation are...
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