On the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, India announced that it would go ahead with the planned nuclear power plant at Jaitapur, Maharashtra. Even the media, which could have kept up the pressure on the government, dismissed the protests by the local people in Jaitapur as one incited by the Shiv Sena and so not worthy of any attention. While I am no Sena supporter, it is difficult...

According to the third advance estimate, India’s foodgrain production in the current farm year (to end in June 2011) will be a record 235.88 million tonnes, including an all-time high wheat output of 84.27 million tonnes against 81.47 million tonnes projected earlier. Ahead of the wheat harvest, the country had buffer foodgrain stock of 47 million tonnes at the start of 2011 in the central pool. A buffer close to double...

India's rural innovators have proved that ordinary people are indeed capable of extraordinary inventions. Despite many constraints -- lack of education and severe cash crunch -- most of them have succeeded in using technology cost-effectively to build ingenious products. A washing-cum-exercise machine, hand operated water lifting device, portable smokeless stove, automatic food making machine, solar mosquito killer, shock proof converter, a floating toilet soap are few of the products on display...

Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has said that though India needs to learn appropriate lessons from the crisis at Japan's nuclear plants, the country cannot give up on nuclear energy. "What has happened in Japan is very serious. We will have to learn appropriate lessons and whatever additional safeguards, additional precautions are required we must take, but I don't believe India can abandon nuclear energy (programme)," Ramesh told mediapersons here yesterday. As...

The colossal hubris, ignorance and smugness of India’s nuclear czars take one’s breath away. The day Japan’s crisis took a decisive turn for the worse, with an explosion in a third Fukushima reactor and fresh radiation leaks, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) secretary Sreekumar Banerjee declared that the nuclear crisis “was purely a chemical reaction and not a nuclear emergency as described by some section(s) of media”. Nuclear Power Corporation...