C.K.Ramachandran Consultant - governance, institutional reform and rural livelihoods   N.Narayanasamy SAGE New Delhi, India 2009 Pages - 363 Price Rs. 550   This is an exhaustive treatise on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) which evolved during the 80s and 90s as a reaction to the top-down approach to development. The book traces the evolution of PRA in considerable detail and attempts to distinguish it from several other related streams of participatory approaches some of which have vanished without...

A UNESCO dossier examines the problems faced by the original tribal inhabitants of the Andaman islands. SINCE the 1780s, a variety of players have vied for space in the Andaman archipelago. Today, apart from the three wings of the country's armed forces, others including rice farmers, timber merchants and academics are trying to push out its original inhabitants from their traditional habitats. For the first time in the past 150 years,...

THE Union agriculture ministry will redraft the seed bill following complaints by MPs, states and farmer groups. Their main grouse is that the bill, which aims to regulate the quality of seeds, does not monitor their prices, crucial for farmers. The Seed Bill 2010 was approved by the Cabinet in March and was to be tabled in the Rajya Sabha in mid-April. Sources in the ministry said MPs and state government...

Amflora is a kind of miracle potato: it is precious to the starch industry.  Johan Bergstrom, a blond and boyish man of 31, who farms here with his father, reached into the dark, soft soil and extricated a tennis-ball-size potato, holding it gently so as not to snap off any of a half-dozen white shoots that were growing out of the potato's eyes. He advised against tasting the potato, whose...

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy told trade delegates in a fax on 12 May that cotton has become a “litmus test” for the “development dimension” of the Doha Round. At a recent review of the issue’s standing in WTO talks, some countries, such as Tanzania, alleged that no progress has been made since 2005. Leonce Kone, the trade minister from Burkina Faso - a cotton-exporting Least Developed Country (LDC) - joined Geneva-based...