-The Wall Street Journal   While modern crop engineering faces endless red tape, more slipshod cross-breeding gets a free pass. India has enjoyed signal successes with genetic engineering in agriculture. But today the nation's relationship with this critical biotechnology is in total disarray, the victim of activists' scaremongering and government pandering. Delhi should know better. Following the adoption of the genetically improved varieties and intensive crop management practices of the Green Revolution, from 1960...

-One World South Asia Reducing incomes, stagnating yields, increasing costs of cultivation, fragmenting of land-holdings and reducing of institutions credit facilities plot the graph of farmers' suicides in India. A national consultation and public hearing on framers' suicides being organised by Action Aid in the capital brought together experts and policy critics to evaluate the progress of government initiatives to respond to the ongoing agrarian crisis. Suicides are only one extreme symptom of...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: Talodhi, a village in Chandrapur district, is emerging as a centre for 'rice breeding' in literal sense. Two retired agricultural scientists from city, a big farming family from the village, the Poshattiwars, and some local farmers have joined hands in developing new genetically pure varieties from locally available varieties. It would not be an exaggeration if Poshattiwars and their team of farmers are called 'farmer scientists' as...

-The Hindu Business Line Pushpa M. Bhargava, former Vice-Chairman of National Knowledge Commission, has defended the recommendations of the technical committee, appointed by the Supreme Court, which called for a moratorium on the field trials of genetically modified crops. “The recommendations are in consonance with the increasing evidence and awareness in the two American continents where over 90 per cent of the world’s GM crops are grown that the increasing health problems...

-The Economic Times The fear of drought in India has abated with late precipitation of the monsoon in September this year. However, the country continues to suffer from a drought of formalised tabulated data of agro items on a real-time or monthly basis, though many estimates continue to fatigue the print and electronic media.  Red or green prices flashing on computer screens are taken for 'granted', but the discovery of future or...