-The Business Standard (Capital Market) The Government is promoting organic farming through various schemes like National Project on Organic Farming (NPOF), National Horticulture Mission (NHM), Horticulture Mission for North East & Himalayan States (HMNEH), National Project on Management of Soil Health and Fertility (NPMSH&F), Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) and also Network Project on Organic Farming of Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). Under NPOF scheme, assistance upto 25% and 33% of...

-The Tribune Punjab: No doubt there is a pressing need to restore the fast deteriorating underground water balance in Punjab and parts of Haryana because of excessive withdrawals of water to meet the irrigation requirements of water-guzzling crops, particularly the rice crop. In Punjab available canal water hardly meets one-fourth of the water requirements of the agriculture sector and three-fourth water requirements are met through the pumping of underground water. In...

-The Hindu In the case of technologies with benefits and risks, it is important to have regulatory mechanisms which can help analyse them in an impartial manner It is 61 years since the beginning of new genetics based on the discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. It is also 31 years since the production of transgenic plants. The first patent for a living organism went to Dr. Anand...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: For a country which till recently had a weak civil society movement, India is now witnessing a boom in the NGO sector. With a population of 1.2 billion, the country could well be the land of opportunities for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with the Central Bureau of Investigation conservatively estimating 20 lakh of them already operating in states and union territories. The mind-boggling figures boil down to...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Fertilizer minister Srikant Jena may keep claiming that annually 30 lakh tonne of highly subsidized urea for agriculture is being smuggled to chemical factories, but the government says states have reported only 24 such cases since 2010-11. Jena had recently said at a conference of Indian Fertilizer Association (IFA) that there are serious signs of mismanagement in an information Technology-driven era when targeted farmers can be...