People with agricultural land that they do not wish to cultivate will soon have the option of depositing it in government land banks that will offer them consistent monetary returns. With an incentive system broadly on the lines of a bank account, the public land bank will offer payments based on the tenure and size of the holding with additional benefits if the land is leased out. "A lot of land is...

-The Business Standard E-waste disposal cannot ignore the informal sector The deadline for the enforcement of new electronic waste (e-waste) management norms is just a month or so away. And yet, most of the sector’s stakeholders seem quite unprepared. The E-waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2011, notified almost a year ago as coming into effect from May 1 this year, require producers of electronic and white goods to take back their products...

  For women, the NREGA would bring important social gains   Not being an expert on the subject and too lazy to read all the fine print, I do not know the exact allocations under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act this year. But I gather the money has been cut down, largely because the sums allocated last year were not fully used by most states. Maybe there were other considerations...

The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) has warned against the increasing leasing and buying of millions of hectares of farmlands in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America for food and fuel production. This land is being leased to private investors and sovereign wealth funds with no explicit legal agreement on how water will be used on these farmlands. The World Bank has estimated that over 56 million hectares of land in Africa...

Compulsory licence can go a long way to ensure access to cheaper drugs In a momentous development, the Indian patent office issued the ever-compulsory licence in a highly contentious pharmaceutical patent case. The decision is a thumping victory for several patients and health activists who have been fighting what can only be labelled as highly inequitable pricing strategies by multinational drug firms for the past several decades. In August 2011, Natco, an...