Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it provides employment to people. Most importantly, cooking and eating give us pleasure. …
THE PROMULGATION of the Public Liability Insurance Act (PLI) -- to ensure that victims of chemical accidents get quick compensation -- is brewing into a controversy with public sector enterprises reluctant to take out policies under the new scheme. Under this law, insurance cover of a maximum of Rs five …
THE SUPREME Court has exempted the sale of steroid-antihistamine drug combinations for treatment of asthma from a ban until the next hearing in August. In 1981, the Drug Technical Advisory Board had recommended a ban on all steroid combinations, excluding asthma drugs. The ban was extended to asthma five years …
MOST CITY dwellers are acutely aware of the growing problem of pollution. Now, action against this scourge seems to be heating up. Hyderabad's polluted Hussain Sagar lake may get a new lease of life with Rs 10 crore of Australian aid pumped in to clean it up. In Bombay, a …
ELEPHANTS are fast becoming a law and order problem in some parts of the country. A herd of elephants crossed over from Bihar into the tribal district of Sarguja in MP, attacking villages and fields. In the last few years, officials say 14 people have been killed but tribals say …
SOLAR cells used to tap energy from the sun are made up of photovoltaic substances such as silicon which, when combined with suitable additives and exposed to sunlight, produce electricity. Extracting crystalline silicon from the compounds in which it is found is highly energy-intensive and the element itself accounts for …
BASUDEO ORAON had lost all hopes of ever retrieving his young son Daham from the bondage of Jagdish Kushwaha, a carpet loom owner of Lohara village in UP's Mirzapur district. Daham had been working for the last two years for Kushwaha and Basudeo's efforts to secure either his son's release …
THE BOOK under review is an exhaustive, intensely researched, painstaking study of the social organisation of the Munda of Central India. This area is not the same as the historical or the political region, and is being increasingly referred to now as middle India. The author disarmingly admits he was …
WHEN animals live in groups, many paradoxes occur that are hard to explain within the framework of the classical Darwinian theory of natural selection. For example, a honey-bee spends its entire life working selflessly for the welfare of its queen mother and thousands of its sibling larvae. In 1964, scientist …
THE GARBAGE heaps of Kathmandu, which rise in ugly mounds against the breathtaking beauty of the Himalayan ranges, tell a story -- a story of blind, lopsided, urban growth in one of the poorest countries in south Asia. And what is happening in Kathmandu is symptomatic of the growing urban …
IN 1894, when the colonial government imposed a countervailing excise duty on Indian cotton goods to offset the advantages that may have accrued to the Indian textile industry because of a 5 per cent import duty levied on all foreign goods, it became yet another symbol of British imperialism. Nationalist …
IT WAS a typical Indian village, with low, thatched roofs, mud walls and floor. Yet, as I went around I was told, "This is Germany, this is Canada and this, America". Strange names for huts in a village? Not if the village is UP's Varanasi district, also known as Dollarland …
THIS book is part of a project on technology transfer, transformation and development implemented by United Nations University (UNU), a UN organ established in 1972 to conduct research related to pressing global problems of human survival, development and welfare. UNU undertook a project to study the Japanese experience between 1978 …
SEEING Beyond Genocide again after four years can bring back the anger and frustration one felt when visiting Bhopal shortly after the Union Carbide gas leak and wandering through JP Nagar and the MIC ward of Hamidia Hospital. In 1988, Doordarshan declared that a film on this unending tragedy was …
The results of a study on the fishery, biology, exploitation and mortality of hilsa shad (Hisa ilishu) are presented. The average annual landing of Hilsa ilisha for 1979 - 88 was 5710 tonnes forming 0.4% of the total landings. The major craft and gears and the contributions of different states …
Farm forestry was promoted in India in the late 1970s to produce fuelwood for rural consumption. The program was immensly successful in the green revolution region in the early 1980s, but farmers produced wood for markets, and not to meet local needs. This market orientation of farmers was recognized in …
UNTIL about five years ago, Gambhari was a sleepy island hamlet in Chilika lake and senior Puri district administration officials were barely aware of it. So were Balbhadrapur, Alupatanam, Satapada, Panaspada and many more. All of them were merely names in the district"s revenue records. But today these villages are …
"MAVA NATE Mava Raj" (our government in our village) is the slogan Sarvodaya workers raised at a 1988 meeting in Maharashtra's Gadchiroli district, to educate people about village democracy. After the slogan-shouting, an old, "illiterate" Maria Gond adivasi, clad in a loin-cloth, stunned the Sarvodaya workers by asking, "You people …
PERHAPS no other enterprise of the staid house of Tatas has drawn as much flak from environmental and social activists as its Rs 20 crore Chilika Aquatic Farms Ltd. Many are puzzled why a business group that has steadfastly kept aloof from environmental controversies, should go to such lengths to …
THE RECENT decision to delay indefinitely the introduction of the long-acting female contraceptive Norplant-6 comes as good news for women's groups who have actively campaigned against its introduction in the Indian family planning programme. Norplant-6 consists of a set of six matchstick-size tubes, filled with progesterone, a steroid hormone, which …
WHILE international agencies and the Union government have shown much concern for the protection and sustainable management of Chilika, the Orissa government's response has been surprisingly lacklustre. It was at the 1971 convention on wetlands, held at Ramsar in Iran, that attention was drawn to protection of the lake. India …
