Is the chemical fertilizer-based food production system sustainable? As a result, what happens to the soil and the larger issue of food security? After a raging debate, the government finally decided to hike the chemical fertilizer subsidy, to catch up with spiralling fertilizer prices in the global market. Also, there is talk about bringing urea under the Nutrient Based Subsidy (NBS) system and decontrolling its prices. Obviously, the fertilizer industry...

Fifty million "environmental refugees" will flood into the global north by 2020, fleeing food shortages sparked by climate change, experts warned at a major science conference that ended here Monday. "In 2020, the UN has projected that we will have 50 million environmental refugees," University of California, Los Angeles professor Cristina Tirado said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). "When people are...

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) completed five years this month. Pandurni village, in Nanded district in Maharashtra, is in high spirits. It has won the award for best performance in implementing the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for 2009-10. Around 1,500 people from this village are registered under this scheme, and over 800 have benefitted from it. Yahswant Suryavanshi is one of them. This owner of two hectares of agricultural land says...

Small, marginal and those farmers living below poverty line (BPL) in Gujarat may get an opportunity to design solutions for their own plot of land. If everything goes right, Gujarat government, under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), has plans of taking each farmer's land as an individual project and give liberty to choose what they want to with it to earn livelihood under the scheme. This years' planning for...

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme completes five years this year. A week before the budget, CNBC TV18's Gopika Gopakumar travels to the interiors of Maharashtra to find out how the NREGA scheme is getting implemented. Pandurni village, in Nanded District of Maharashtra, is in high spirits. It has won the award for best performance in implementing the rural employment guarantee scheme for 2009-10. Around 1,500 people from this village are registered...