If the environment ministry's draft proposal for 'inviolate forest areas' is accepted, large swathes of healthy forests, including national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, tiger reserves and wildlife corridors, would be out of bounds for all mining activities, and not just coal excavation. The ministry's draft lists criteria for identifying forest patches where mining should be banned following the GoM on coal's decision to junk the no-go policy of the environment ministry. The...

-The Economic Times Kulvinder Gill, professor of breeding and genetics at the Washington State University in the US, describes himself as a dreamer and an optimist. One of his dreams is to make sure food production does not decline over the next few decades, when increasing temperatures act on the yields of major crops. Specifically, he is beginning a project with six other organisations in India to make wheat less sensitive to...

Jamshedpur, June 10: For a people who have clung to next-door Bengal for healthcare for years, setting up a self-run school — English medium, no less — may well be just another way out of elusive state welfare measures. The 700-odd population of 19 villages that make up Gopalpur panchayat, 80km from Jamshedpur in East Singhbhum’s rebel-hit Baharagora block, have made up its mind to do just that. The primary schools, at...

Gosikhurd was sanctioned in 1983 and meant to irrigate 2.5 lakh hectares in Vidarbha As Manikrao Gedam sits outside his three-room house, he wonders how he has benefited by giving up his 10 acres for the Gosikhurd Irrigation project at Bhandara in Maharashtra's Vidarbha region. For that matter, he wonders what anyone has gained from it. Today, he has nothing else, but the house in a resettlement colony; his sons are unemployed; and...

Islamapur, Nalanda: One family builds a house that has no walls, no doors, just a bizarre semi-circular curved strip buried in the sand; another builds a thatched house with no approach road so everyone has to sleep by the side of the highway and cook in the open. And 70 other families don’t know what to do because all the plots they got last November — to build their homes...