The revolution of the 1960s saved decades worth of greenhouse gas emissions. The Green Revolution of the 1960s raised crop yields and cut hunger — and also saved decades worth of greenhouse gas emissions, a study concludes. U.S. researchers found cumulative global emissions since 1850 would have been one third as much again without the Green Revolution's higher yields. Although modern farming uses more energy and chemicals, much less land needs...

Beneficiaries of schemes under MahATMa Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) will now get their wages without haing to go to the bank or post office and without seeking help from middlemen to complete the formalities. To ensure this, the state rural development department has sign an agreement with Union Bank which will provide biometric cards to the MGNREGA beneficiaries. The first lot of 5,000 biometric cards will be...

WITH the introduction of short-term, high-yielding varieties of cereal and oil-seed crops, the cropping intensity has now reached almost 300 per cent in Punjab. Moreover, the intensive use of chemical fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides involve greater use of scarce groundwater resources. The water table has gone down alarmingly resulting in huge investment on installation of costly submersible pumps to draw water for irrigation. This does not auger well for sustainable...

Bhopal cast a pall on Singur today, fed by a cocktail of pollution, panic and politics. A chemical factory, declared a “fit case for closure” by the state pollution control board (PCB) two months ago, spewed carbon soot-laced smoke this dawn. The plant belongs to Himadri Chemicals and Industries, a company with an annual turnover of over Rs 500 crore and said to be the country’s largest manufacturer of coal tar...

The Indian press has expressed outrage at the sentences handed down to Union Carbide employees found guilty of negligence over the gas leak that killed thousands of people in Bhopal in 1984. One paper described the two-year sentences given to eight former Union Carbide executives as "absurdly light punishment" and "a travesty of justice". Several accused successive Indian governments of kowtowing to US business interests in their failure to bring the...