-Financial Express Given the health impacts of Bt brinjal on animals, one needs to keep in mind that the GM crop surely cannot be declared as safe. Bt brinjal has been found to be released illegally and predictably it has sparked furious reactions on all sides. Some have unsurprisingly already started to ask for Bt brinjal moratorium to be lifted in the light of illegal Bt brinjal cultivation. In the light of...
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With 11,650 stubble FIRes in 2019, Punjab breaks 2018 record -Anju Agnihotri Chaba
-The Indian Express “Last year, we recorded FIRe incidents till May 26 and the figure was 11,468. This year were are recording till May-end as the harvesting of wheat was delayed due to untimely rains,” said Anil Sood, head of the ACM Division, PRSC, Ludhiana. Jalandhar: Stubble burning incidents in Punjab have crossed the 2018 figure despite the efforts of the state government to stop farmers of burning their fields post...
More »Don't dilute the RTI and the forest rights Acts -Gautam Bhatia
-Hindustan Times It is also important to remember that both these laws were the product of sustained, grassroots-level social movements. Consequently, perhaps the surest remedy against possible future dilution may lie not in judicial challenges (although that remains important), but in popular mobilisation. With the 2019 general election yielding a decisive mandate for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), attention will soon turn to the new government’s legislative agenda. As the government is...
More »How can India gauge vulnerability of its agricultural productivity to climate change? -Raghu Murtugudde
-FIRstpost.com The sensitivity of agricultural productivity to climate depends strongly on crop selection. India is a vast country with disparate climate variability and change signals from north-to-south and east-to-west. The mix of field crops like rice, wheat, jowar, corn and soybean, as well as speciality products like vegetables, flowers, nuts, fruits, etc, are also vastly different across the subcontinent. To understand the climate sensitivity of agriculture across such complex terrain that has...
More »To create jobs, an industrial policy focused on labour-intensive industries is key -Santosh Mehrotra
-Hindustan Times These sectors deserve consistent support over time to compete internationally since India is lagging behind Manufacturing contributed in 2017 only about 16% to India’s GDP, stagnating since economic reforms began in 1991. By contrast, in east and south-east Asia, the industry share has exceeded 30-40% while manufacturing is 20-30%. India’s manufacturing share of GDP has not moved up at all, though between 2004-05 and 2011-12 manufacturing employment growth was...
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