-The Telegraph New Delhi: Five years after sequencing the pigeonpea genome, Indian scientists have identified Madhya Pradesh as the centre of origin of this nationwide staple legume and discovered genes they say will allow the expansion of pigeonpea cultivation. Scientists at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) near Hyderabad and their collaborators in Australia, China and the US yesterday announced the results of a new study that has traced...

-Down to Earth By 2030, rice and wheat are likely to see about 6-10 per cent decrease in yields Rising temperature affects flowering and leads to pests and disease buildup. Flood and excess rain over a short duration of time cause extensive damage to crops. Extreme weather events have caught attention of agrarian experts and scientists alike and they are now focussing on natural farming to arrest the impacts of climate...

-Down to Earth Meat eating is not the key issue, it is the amount that is consumed and the manner in which it is produced. This is where India differs. Recently at the release of our book First Food: Culture of Taste, which discusses the link between biodiversity, nutrition and livelihoods, I was asked a question. “Why do you not, as an environmentalist espousing the cause of traditional and local diets that...

-The Hindu IR8, the high-yielding rice variety helped India fight famine, turns 50 this month In 1967, when a 29-year-old N. Subba Rao sowed a semidwarf variety of rice in over 2,000 hectares in Atchanta, West Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh, he wouldn't have thought he would be part of a revolution in rice cultivation. What Dr. Rao sowed in his farm was IR-8, a rice variety developed by the International Rice Research...

-Livemint.com Pulses are important from the perspectives of food security, environmental sustainability and balanced nutrition Most pulses such as pigeon pea (tur dal), black gram (urad), green gram (mung), field beans (waal), moth beans (matki) and horse gram (kulith) are native to the Indian subcontinent and have been an integral part of our diet for centuries. However, the single-minded focus on cereals over the last 50 years—the green revolution in wheat and...