Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh said he’d set up an advisory council with participation of industry to look into policy issues regarding environment clearances. The council, to meet once in three months, will examine suggestions on changes required in policy for faster environment and forest clearance. In an interaction yesterday with the Confederation of Indian Industry, he also endorsed the view that all projects related to natural resource extraction should be...

The National Advisory Council headed by Congress president Sonia Gandhi is unhappy with the poor implementation of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, which was once billed as a landmark initiative of the UPA I for economic empowerment of the tribal people. The NAC now wants the government to change the law to make it more effective and has recommended several amendments, including one to...

The new era of price rise can be turned into a profitable proposition for the farmer. The decade that passed can safely be called agrarian. For good or bad reasons, the world spent the decade talking about agriculture. Food grain price rise was the talking point across the continents. To note a landmark, the decade ended an era of cheap food. After the food crisis in 1974 there was a continuous...

The question raises fundamental issues about the MGNREGA’s centralised template and poor delivery mechanism, but it is important to provide a legal basis to its wage structure to protect it against inflation. We need to remember that the way the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was originally conceived, wages were never meant to be equal to the minimum wages; they should have been lower. This is because the...

A small farmer in Maharashtra, whose high-yielding rice variety is popular in five States, is denied the benefits of his research. TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, Dadaji Khobragade of Nanded Fakir village in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra noticed yellow seeds in three spikes of a paddy stalk in his field. Intrigued by the freak harvest, he preserved the grains. He subsequently planted them in a six-foot square plot, which he covered with thorny...