-Tehelka Justice Sujata Manohar on how the Biotechnology Bill is fundamentally flawed IN THE last few years, regulatory systems across the board have been undergoing an overhaul to fit the needs of a new era. Likewise, new laws are being chalked out to meet new needs, and several are receiving flak owing to the loopholes and regressive grounds on which these have been drafted. The relatively more recent one to regulate modern...

-Live Mint Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has rebuked an industry lobby for selectively using his recent comments on genetically modified cotton “to its advantage.” Ramesh said in a seminar on 12 June that there was a structural shift in India’s cotton economy and a comprehensive study was necessary to understand the relative roles of better irrigation, weather and the availability of different cotton varieties to understand how India had gone on...

Soon Indian consumers will have the opportunity to know whether the packaged food that they are buying contains genetically modified organisms. But will that help? In India, where a majority of food is unprocessed and non-packaged, labeling on packaged food may hardly cover the huge populations' right to choose. A gazette notification issued by the ministry of consumer affairs, food and public distribution early this month says that every food package...

India's Genetically Modified (GM) crop growth story has been stalled with just four states allowing field trials. An eminent scientist has sought Prime Minister's intervention in this regard.  Field trials of newly developed GM crops are important for scientific analysis of the yield and its commercial release. Till 2010, research institutions were free to conduct field trials anywhere in the country. But in 2011, the environment ministry had imposed a condition...

The Conflict of Interest Bill introduced in the Rajya Sabha is a welcome step to control the grey areas in which “public private partnerships” are conducted. AMONG the many things that have proliferated in the economic boom of the brash new India is conflict of interest. So widespread, comprehensive and many-tentacled has this feature become that it is often no longer even recognised to exist, much less to be a...