-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Taking a major step forward to scientifically assess 'risk' and 'safety' aspects of transgenic crops, the government's top regulator - Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) - on Friday revalidated 10 varieties of GM crops including wheat, rice, maize and cotton and allowed multi-national Seed Companies to go for "confined field trials" of these varieties. The companies like Monsanto, Mahyco and BASF whose applications got revalidation...

-Financial Chronicle India's independence in 1947 had the great Bengal famine as its backdrop. During the Bengal famine of 1942-43, over three million children, women and men died of starvation. India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, therefore, said in 1947, "Everything else can wait; but not agriculture". This commitment led to the initiation of several programmes in the field of agriculture, such as extension of irrigation facilities, establishment of seed corporations,...

-The Guardian Rice conservationist Debal Deb grapples with 'mindless Indian elite' to reintroduce genetically diverse, drought-tolerant varieties   Fifty years ago, every Indian village would probably have grown a dozen or more rice varieties that grew nowhere else. Passed down from generation to generation and family to family, there would have been a local variety for every soil and taste - rice that would grow well in droughts or deep floods, which had...

-Boloji.com Yavatmal is one of 35 districts in Maharashtra state in Indian subcontinent. It is located in the Vidarbha region, in the east-central part of the state. By the time of British rule, its head quarter was at Wani called Wun by then; now it is shifted to Yavatmal. This district is tribal dominated one. According to the 2011 census, total population of this district is 2,772,348 inclusive of 469,000 tribal...

-The Business Standard But beef up safeguards for genetically modified crop trials Environment Minister M Veerappa Moily has made the right move by overturning the untenable position taken by his predecessors on field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops. Around 200 gene-altered varieties of different crops will now be allowed to be field-tested, subject, of course, to certain necessary conditions. This could, depending on the outcome of the trials, clear the way...