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 FIRST Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) was set up at Kharagpur in 1952. Since then, around 37,000 B Tech graduates have passed out of this and the four other IITs in Kanpur, Delhi, Bombay and Madras. The estimated annual income and expenditure of these five institutions are about Rs …
AFTER all these years, Subhas Mukhopadhyay must be used to taking awards in his stride. Long before prizes and awards came his way (starting with the Sahitya Akademi award that he won in 1964), those of us who knew Subhasda in the 1940s remember him as a soft-spoken communist poet. …
The Rules provide for the application to the Central Zoo Authority in order of being granted recognition as a zoo in India, the classification of zoos on the basis of acreage, number of animal and varieties, and number of visitors per year. Provisions are made on animal health, hygiene, feeding …
IN THE small workshops of Purani Mandi in Saharanpur, woodcarvers fret, fit and polish their carvings for a revitalised urban market in India and abroad. Their own future, however, is precarious. Spiralling prices of fast-depleting raw materials and a market controlled by middlemen threaten to choke this once thriving trade. …
THREE YEARS after the National Wasteland Development Board (NWDB) launched the "Greening the Himalaya" project in the Jadhera panchayat of Himachal Pradesh, the balding hills of the panchayat are turning green once more. But this achievement is not so much due to the NWDB as because of the villagers of …
IN PLACES like Uttar Kannada, M D Subhash Chandran, a botanist from the Dr Baliga College of Arts and Sciences, Kumta, in Karnataka, claims that the ban on shifting cultivation was largely motivated by the need to release labour for the new plantations that were coming up in the area. …
HISTORY is generally seen as a record of kings, queens and warriors. But it could as well be a record of changing human-nature interactions over time. All human societies have exploited their environment for their survival and economic growth. Sometimes this exploitation has been destructive -- for instance, the Mesopotamian …
BUILDERS in Delhi are in a bind. The Supreme Court order to close down stone-crushing units around the Capital has hiked structural costs by 10-15 per cent. The Aravalli notification has drastically cut down prime land they have been opening up in Gurgaon, where land prices are less than a …
PARTICLE physicists scanning the cosmos for the slippery neutrino, claim once again to have established that it has a mass. Anthony Turkevich of the University of Chicago and his collaborators have published a study claiming to have uncovered "another independent line of evidence pointing towards neutrinos having mass." Predictably, this …
The curtain shrouding the Indo-Russian rocket deal seems to be lifting at last with U R Rao, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), reiterating recently that the deal was "very much on". Work on developing the engine jointly is proceeding on schedule and India has "made the initial …
The Hindi proverb that derides the enfeebled mind as one with "worms in the brain", is no longer a literary expression. A study involving 159 worm-infected Jamaican children between 9 and 12, showed that removing moderate to heavy amounts of worms from children led to a significant memory improvement, in …
HELPED along with generous grants from the World Bank and Japan to green the Aravallis, plus its own sizeable forestry budget, the Rajasthan government has embarked on an ambitious compensatory reafforestation plan. District collectors have been asked to identify areas which can be set aside to form part of a …
Researchers at the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow have successfully used a crude extract from the plant baruri (Crataeva nurvala) to dissolve stones in bladder and kidney. G K Patnaik of CDRI's Centre for Advanced Pharmacological Research on Traditional Remedies says lupeol can be extracted from baruri and used …
Only one per cent of the world's bacteria -- those that can be cultured in the lab -- are known, but molecular techniques pioneered by the Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC) in Britain will enable researchers to identify and classify bacteria into reliable genetic groupings. This will provide a …
THE ORISSA government, in direct violation of a Central order, has allowed the Tatas to continue work on the Chilka Aquatic Project. In early June, the minister of state for environment and forests, Kamal Nath, had directed the state government not to proceed with the prawn culture project until the …
Medical researchers at the University of Arkansas have found a way to reduce dramatically the time needed to diagnose tuberculosis. The new method, which involves analysing genetic material found in tuberculosis cells, will enable laboratories to diagnose TB in just 36 hours, instead of upto four weeks that it takes …
THE NATIONAL Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee, has prepared terminology for their science in eight Indian languages. About 400 terms have been selected and their equivalents prepared in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. The aim of this exercise is to facilitate communication between people speaking the same …
HINDUSTAN Machine Tools is in the process of fabricating three 23 ft X 11 ft and 30 20 ft X 8 ft population clocks that will indicate, along with the time, the increase in size of the population at each point of time. The government, which is acquiring the clocks …
WHILE contaminated water has occupied centrestage in Udaipur for many years, the Pesticides India plant has been insidiously emitting odorous gases for almost as long. The plant manufactures pesticides, including phorate, all of which are highly toxic. While officials at the plant claim they have taken all possible precautions to …
THE CAMPAIGN against changes in India's patent, science and investment laws, to bring them in line with the draft proposals of Arthur Dunkel, director-general of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), will now move to the legislatures and the courts. Formulated by the Azadi Bachao Andolan (ABA), a …
