-The Financial Express   With newer varieties and improvement in yield, packaging and marketing, basmati-long hailed as the ‘king of rice'-is spreading its sweet aroma worldwide WALK INTO any supermarket today and the most eye-catching items will be in the section selling packaged rice. Rice, that humble, century-old staple of the Indian diet, has emerged from its traditional image-grains in an open gunny bag-to a slick new avatar. Today, rice, and basmati in...

-The Hindu   New Delhi: The Delhi Government's Food and Civil Supplies Department has decided to deactivate around 1.65 lakh ration cards which have been found to be bogus. Disbursement of ration (subsidised food grains) was stopped to around 1.7 lakh card holders across the city from April this year suspecting that these cards might be bogus. After giving two months time to the card holders to prove their authenticity, the department has...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: Plants make food from carbon dioxide in the air, using energy from sunlight. So, if carbon dioxide levels in the air are going up due to climate change, plants should be making more food, right? Wrong, says a new study published last week in the science journal Nature. According to the study conducted by a team of US, Australian and Japanese scientists, carbon dioxide emissions are...

-Live Mint   Prakash Javadekar's environment ministry proposes reduction in parameters defining forests as inviolate New Delhi: On a day it took the environment approval process online, the new government proposed diluting the norms for allowing industrial units in forest areas, moving to clear a logjam in project mandates that industry groups allege has contributed to declining economic growth. Not only will it make the process of environment clearances easier, the norms, once changed,...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: On World Environment Day, this could be worrying news for the new environment minister. A study by forest researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) has concluded that India could be grossly "over-reporting" its forest cover. The researchers say that the existing forest cover, in reality, may be what the Forest Survey of India had reported back in 1997. This is because, they say,...