The Supreme Court on May 7 ruled that natural resources were national assets that belonged to the people and were ideally exploited by public sector undertakings. This obviously implies that local communities, including tribals, living on mineralised land, enjoy entitlements but not prescriptive ownership rights to such national assets. This is an important reiterative clarification defining mineral rights in Fifth Schedule areas that are currently in contention. Whether PSUs should...

Ram Prasad Ghosal, a potato farmer from Bamunpara (Dist Burdwan) in West Bengal, owns 10 acres of land. Just two months earlier, though, his ilk faced a major scare. The region witnessed a bumper potato crop of 9.5 million tonnes — 73 per cent higher than last year’s production. Wholesale prices in Kolkata crashed to Rs 300 a quintal. Retail prices, too, dropped to Rs 6-8 a kg. Farmers were...

Water, water everywhere, and so many committees to deal with it. On top of so many ministries and committees that think about water, the government has decided that India needs a Water Mission. Apart from the water resources ministry, the ministries of rural development, agriculture and environment and forests are actively involved in water conservation work. Besides, the river basin authorities are also supposed to look after water management in...

Parinathi, a Non Government Organisation is bringing smiles on the faces of farmers in 5 GPs of Kadur taluk by providing technical assistance.    It has been taking up watershed works, promoting organic farming and self-employment to economically backward families for the last 2 years. The organisation will work for the implementation of various projects worth Rs 80 lakh under the Watershed Development Fund of NABARD in the last four years. Schemes...

The world needs to act quickly to counter the erosion of species. The task is particularly important for India, one of the 12 mega-biodiversity centres.  May 22 marked the International Day for Biological Diversity. It commemorates the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that day in 1992. As of December 2009, exactly 192 countries and the European Commission were signatories to it. This year has been declared the...