Activists hope that a popular agitation against the setting up of a factory to manufacture asbestos products in the eastern Bihar state will result in a nationwide ban on the large-scale import into this country of the deadly mineral fibre. Following six months of agitation against the setting up of the factory in the Chainpur-Bishunpur area of Bihar’s Muzzaffarpur district, state chief minister Nitish Kumar sought to lay blame on the...

India’s rulers have found a new vocation – maligning environmentalists and questioning the very idea of regulating industry for pollution. Thus, faced with criticism of Lavasa, an artificial gated city of the super-rich near Pune, in which his family has invested crores, Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar, lashed out at well-known activist Medha Patkar and other “vested interests” for obstructing this “pioneering” project. Lavasa’s promoters built the project without seeking environmental clearance...

Global wheat harvests may trail demand for a second year, spurring hoarding and further price gains, said the United Nations. “Whenever you get the market as tight as we are now, hoarding becomes widespread,” Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said in an interview by phone from Rome. Wheat, corn and soybeans soared to the highest levels since 2008 yesterday as a U.S. government report showed...

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the pioneer of supercomputing in the country, is now assisting the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) to establish a national agricultural bioinformatics grid. The initiative, the first of its kind in the country, will help scientists enhance agricultural productivity and address problems of food security. Under the project, a three-day training-cum-workshop on ‘parallel and high performance computing’ began at C-DAC on Monday, with...

THE World Bank IN INDIA - Undermining Sovereignty, Distorting Development: Edited by Michele Kelley, Deepika D'Souza; Orient Blackswan, 3-6-752, Himayatnagar, Hyderabad-500029. Rs. 895. This book is a collection of essays covering an array of economic issues ranging from agriculture, poverty, food security, power, water, to governance, environment impact and sustainability of growth, and the impact of the World Bank on them. Even a cursory reading would show that it is a...