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...

Smallholders and rural producers have a vital role to play in overcoming global hunger and poverty, and new and varied partnerships are needed, with particular emphasis on the interests of women, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today. “With more than 1 billion people now suffering from hunger, the highest number in human history, there is simply no time to lose,” he told the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized...

Without fertilisers, said Normal Borlaug, the world would need two billion people to volunteer to just disappear.  Obviously, it makes sense to increase the supply of fertilisers rather than to look for those volunteers. Sense, however, is in short supply in India’s fertiliser policy , and we have a supply shortage of the stuff. The domestic price of fertiliser has been static since 2002 and the domestic industry has seen...

India’s relative position with respect to the Education Development Index remains poor. There is a lot to do in terms of improving schooling facilities.  According to the ‘EFA Global Monitoring Report 2010’ (UNESCO), India’s rank was 105 among 128 countries. And it continues to figure, along with a bunch of African and one or two Asian countries, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, in the group of countries with a low...

Even as the nation waits with bated breath for the decision to be taken by Jairam Ramesh, the debate on whether Bt brinjal should be introduced in India [ Images ] or not continues. The minister of state for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh was in Bangalore on Saturday to hold the last leg of discussions with non-government organisations, farmers and scientists on whether Bt brinjal should be introduced in...