Spurred in part by the debate over Bt brinjal, and in part by the controversy raised abroad by certain products based on nanotechnology, the government is planning to set up a regulatory board  in March that will examine all new nanotechnology devices before they are commercially marketed. “The reason we’ve had problems with Bt brinjal is that we don’t have a strong regulatory body,” C. R. N. Rao, scientific...

With the mountains of hazardous waste from electronic products growing exponentially in developing countries, sometimes by as much as 500 per cent, the United Nations today called for new recycling technologies and regulations to safeguard both public health and the environment. So-called e-waste from products such as old computers, printers, mobile phones, pagers, digital photo and music devices, refrigerators, toys and televisions, are set to rise sharply in tandem with...

Monica Das Gupta is a senior social scientist at the World Bank. Her field research in Punjab, when she was at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, established that sex differentials in child mortality in rural Punjab persisted despite relative wealth, socio-economic development including rapid universalization of female education, fertility decline, and mortality decline. Amartya Sen’s writings drew attention to female foeticide and infanticide in Asia that led to...

80 % construction complete, but only 3 % rehabilitation has been done  The Environment Ministry has issued a show cause notice to the company building the Maheshwar Dam in the Narmada Valley after hundreds of affected people marched to the Ministry demanding rehabilitation. According to the notice, if the company cannot explain why 80 per cent of construction is over even while rehabilitation efforts lag behind, the project could be...

While the jury is still out on whether Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh did the right thing by putting a moratorium on the use of Bt brinjal, or whether he simply played to the gallery by only taking into account the concerns of the environmentalists, policy-makers need to ponder over some other implications. The introduction of Bt cotton, for instance, led to production more than doubling between 2002-03 and 2007-08, from...