To provide value-addition in farming activities and arrest the falling farm incomes in the district, the Department of Agriculture is set to introduce ‘Integrated Farming System' practices on a commercial basis in the entire 13 blocks.

The integrated system is the concept of judicious mixing of poultry, mushroom cultivation, fisheries, agro-forestry, goat/cow rearing and sericulture along with the main agricultural crop cultivation on a unit area which could help bring prosperity to farming.

Is the Asia-Pacific region set to bear the onerous title of having become the disaster centre of the globe? So it would seem if one went by UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Development Report “One Planet to Share — Sustaining Human Progress in a Changing Climate”.

Climate-related disasters are on the rise and during the last two decades, 45 per cent of the world’s natural disasters, whether it be floods in Pakistan in 2010 or Cyclone Nargis which hit Burma in 2008, have occurred here, resulting in numerous deaths, massive human dislocations and severe economic losses.

even years after unveiling the rural job guarantee scheme, the Centre on Tuesday announced a major extension of scope of works under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) in a bid to revive demand for jobs, which witnessed over 20 per cent dip in the last financial year.

Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday tabled the “MNREGA 2.0 — the second generation reforms” for the flag scheme in both Houses of Parliament

Late last year, fishermen began finding dead dolphins, hundreds of them, washed up on Peru’s northern coast. Now, seabirds have begun dying, too, and the government has yet to conclusively pinpoint a cause.

Officials insist that the two die-offs are unrelated. The dolphins are succumbing to a virus, they suggest, and the seabirds are dying of starvation because anchovies are in short supply.

From being a much sought-after delicacy found in abundance in the Godavari and Krishna rivers, to figuring in the global IUCN Red List of threatened species, the fringed-lipped carp (Labeo fimbriatus) has been hunted almost to extinction, thanks to unscientific overharvesting.

A serious effort is hence being made by the Andhra Pradesh Biodiversity Board to revive the once-popular fish species by introducing fingerlings this monsoon, to start with, in the Godavari river system in Adilabad district.

The government has approved the Master Plan of the Haor Development Board and decided to protect the country's fish species by creating a fish sanctuary on 20 percent of jalmahals (water bodies) in haor areas.

The decision was taken at the third meeting of Bangladesh Haor and Water Body Development Board on Thursday with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the chair.

Six years after the Yangtze river dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer), or baiji, was declared "functionally extinct" by scientists, another marine mammal appears on the edge of extinction in China's hugely degraded Yangtze River. In less than two months, 32 Yangtze finless porpoises (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis), a subspecies of the finless porpoise, have been dead found in Dongting and Poyang Lakes in the Yangtze, reports the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).