To restore the lost pride in the endosulfan issue, the Congress is planning to come up with a comprehensive rehabilitation package for the endosulfan victims of Kasargod when the UDF comes to power. The top leadership of the party in the state is of the view that the Stockholm Convention and the Central Government’s stand on the issue did not give due importance to the rehabilitation package and also into the...

Representatives from 127 governments have agreed to add endosulfan to the United Nations' list of persistent organic pollutants to be eliminated worldwide. The action puts the widely-used pesticide on track for elimination from the global market by 2012. The decision was among more than 30 measures taken by Parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants to strengthen global action against POPs at their meeting in Geneva last week. The...

The state government has switched to funding water conservation and harvesting projects through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employee Guarantee Act (MNREGA). In the fiscal 2010-11, water conservation projects guzzled maximum funds released under the MNREGA with the government deciding to channel more than 40 per cent of the total funds into water harvesting, restoration of traditional water baoris and de-silting of water bodies like ponds and lakes. Funds were channelled...

The Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Vikas Parishad today “took back” land that was being used by a Siliguri-based planter as a small tea garden for the past five years, alleging that he had duped the Adivasi owners. The Jalpaiguri administration has termed the “takeover” illegal. “Who gave them the rights or the responsibility of reclaiming tribal land? There is an administration and government procedure for everything. They should have come to us...

The upsurge in the use of the toxic pesticide endosulfan, targeted for prohibition by the international community, illustrates one of the dilemmas of intensive agriculture in Argentina and Latin America in general. "There is always a natural solution," insists farmer Alicia Alem, a member of an Argentine cooperative that produces cereal and forage crops without chemical fertilisers or pesticides. "In terms of wheat, for example, the cooperative gets exactly the same yield...