Veteran agricultural scientist and alumnus of Harvard and Berkeley Universities, Dr Peter Kenmore was in Mumbai for NABARD’s 30th anniversary lecture on ‘Future of Global Agriculture: Challenges and Opportunities for India.’ This United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization India representative spoke to Yogesh Pawar on the current scenario in agriculture. Some excerpts: There’s a lot of churn over GM technology in India. At a time when the country is grappling with...

A government panel has recommended the enactment of a “comprehensive, standalone law” on the so-called “honour killings”, handing equal punishment to the killers, plotters and the instigators at kangaroo courts. “The current provisions in the Indian Penal Code are inadequate in dealing with these acts of crime,” says the Planning Commission’s steering committee on women’s agency and child rights for the 12th Five-Year Plan. Its report, posted on the plan panel’s website...

It is mostly caused by deliberate neglect and designed failure of the way we manage water and land It’s drought time again. Nothing new in this announcement. Each year, first we have crippling droughts between December and June, and then devastating floods in the next few months. It’s a cycle of despair, which is more or less predictable. But this is not an inevitable cycle of nature we must live...

-PTI Senior IAS officer Pradeep Shukla was today detained here and questioned by the CBI in connection with the multi-crore National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam. A 1981-batch IAS officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre, 55-year-old Shukla was detained while on his way to the airport, official sources said, adding the CBI had repeatedly summoned him to appear before the agency for questioning. Though CBI officially maintained that he had neither been detained...

Doctors across India who encounter patients with tuberculosis will have to disclose the identity, age, sex, and address of each patient to local health authorities under an order issued this week by the Union health ministry. The health ministry said today that it is essential to have complete information as part of its efforts to ensure that patients receive proper diagnosis and therapy and to curb the emergence and spread of...