Even as the highest ever harvest of wheat and rice is expected this year, callous administration is leading to rice literally going up in smoke in the Punjab. Tens of thousands of tons of rice stocked for the last five years in the open have now caught fire at a Punjab Agro storage area in Khamano, a large procurement market.   An incensed Supreme Court had in 2010 said if the government...

Representatives from 127 governments have agreed to add endosulfan to the United Nations' list of persistent organic pollutants to be eliminated worldwide. The action puts the widely-used pesticide on track for elimination from the global market by 2012. The decision was among more than 30 measures taken by Parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants to strengthen global action against POPs at their meeting in Geneva last week. The...

What is Endosulfan? Endosulfan is a pesticide which was introduced in the 1950s and soon became a leading chemical to fight a broad spectrum of insects. The out-of-patent pesticide is marketed under several names across the world. The most common of these names is Thiodane. It is used in paddy, cotton, vegetables, fruits, cashew, tea, coffee and a wide range of other crops. Because of its effectiveness against termites, it is...

Nearly 60 per cent of tuberculosis medication dose strengths sold in India through prescriptions of private practitioners do not conform with standard TB treatment guidelines, a study has revealed. The findings corroborate suggestions made by some Indian doctors — several times over the past two decades — that a majority of private practitioners do not write correct prescriptions for treating TB. The government’s TB control programme provides free TB treatment to more...

It will be a major improvement over current system, says Jairam Ramesh The Union government is in the process of setting up a National Environmental Appraisal and Monitoring Authority (NEAMA) as part of efforts to bring in institutional reforms and improve environmental governance, Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh said here on Tuesday. The Minister was delivering the second Lawrence Dana Pinkham Memorial Lecture at the convocation...