Mamata Banerjee’s assurance over land allotment, coal access falls flat. Two weeks after West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee assured JSW Steel vice chairman and managing director Sajjan Jindal that all issues will be ironed out, fresh problems, including capping access to coal mines have struck the state’s largest investment. A number of riders are creeping into the terms and conditions set forth in the development agreement that JSW Steel had signed...

The Union Government has prepared the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India Bill, 2001 (BRAI in brief) for the regulation of the biotechnology sector in India. While the need for strong and careful regulation certainly exists keeping in view the serious threats posed to health and environment by the genetically modified (GM) crops, the BRAI can actually increase this threat by paving the way for the rapid spread of GM crops...

New research from Navdanya and from the US Union of Concerned Scientists proves that Bt cotton yields are actually a third of what Monsanto claims. Genetic engineering is not going to help feed the world, writes Vandana Shiva, but it is going to harm public health and ecosystems We have been repeatedly told that genetically engineered (GE) crops will save the world. They will save the world by increasing yields and...

Less than two years after splitting coal mining zones into ‘go and no-go’ — a move that has stalled almost every big-ticket coal mining project in India — the government is scrapping the policy. The Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF), which had framed the policy guidelines along with the Ministry of coal, on Tuesday accepted that the categorisation of ‘go and no-go’ did not have any legal sanctity. The move was...

-The Hindu   Cautioning against keeping “high-investment facilities” idle, the former Atomic Energy Commission chief, M. R. Srinivasan, has sought a vigorous public relations push to counter the “misinformation campaign” against the Kudankulam nuclear project. Noting that there is some amount of misunderstanding in the minds of the people protesting against the project after the Fukushima accident in Japan, he said, “Safety is not in anyway compromised.” “The Atomic Energy Department, Nuclear Power Corporation...