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. …
IT'S BEEN a rat race to get the patent. But Harvard University's onco-mouse, a creature designed in a laboratory for cancer research, may still not make it. In mid-May, shortly after the European Patent Office published its patent for this mouse that has been given cancer-causing genes, European green activists …
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) is hoping that an international convention will get accepted on industrial disasters like Bhopal at this year's session of the International Labour Conference, commencing in Geneva in early June. The convention aims to set comprehensive safety standards and protocols for controlling flammable materials and toxic …
THE GOVERNMENT is learning to lead by example. Its largest construction agency, the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), has decided that the use of wood in its housing projects will be banned from April 1993. The urban development secretary, Raj Bhargava, points to the paradox of the government borrowing for …
INDIA and Bangladesh have arrived at an agreement to prepare a comprehensive and permanent sharing of the Ganga-Brahmaputra waters. This agreement was reached in New Delhi between visiting Bangladeshi Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia and her Indian counterpart, P V Narasimha Rao. The pact also refers to using waters from …
THE SUBANSIRI hydel project in Arunachal Pradesh may not take off as the ministry of environment and forests feels it will cause irreparable damage to the biodiversity of the region. This contrasts with the support the project has got from both the Planning Commission and the water resources ministry. These …
DEVELOPMENT has two sides, as Sudipto Sarkar of the People United for Better Living in Calcutta told the Calcutta High Court recently. The court is hearing a case against the proposed reclamation of eastern Calcutta's wetlands. The voluntary agency informed the court that the West Bengal government's idea to develop …
GENETICS presents a strange dilemma. Manipulations in this field have greatly increased the yields of crops, animals and trees. Witness the green and white revolutions and the large commercial timber and fruit plantations. Ironically, this cloning threatens the global gene pool itself. It is important to conserve the global gene …
WILL HE go? Will he sign? Will he give money? All these and many more questions on the behaviour of the US President George Bush are threatening to overtake the Earth Summit at Rio. Bush's cat and mouse strategy is an effort to push the Europeans, Asians and Africans to …
THE VILLAGE of Seed stands out as a green oasis in Rajasthan's denuded Aravallis. Its gram sabha meets regularly and, being a gramdan village, it has full control over all the land within the village boundary, including erstwhile government land. Rawat was the adhyaksha (chairperson) of Seed's gram sabha from …
Gods, it is said, can assume any shape or many shapes at one time. Our mythological Hanuman, monkey god of the epic Ramayan, conforms to this omniscience. A combination of the rhesus monkey, the langur and man, it cannot be said to belong to any single species. I find this …
THERE IS A missing link that keeps the work of our scientists very insulated. It keeps their work from reaching potential beneficiaries. These are educated people who ought to know. They visit Delhi regularly from areas where such work could be of use but are totally unaware of what is …
THE RECENT meeting of non-government organisations (NGOs) at Udaipur had an interesting agenda: how to evolve a way to deal with the drought in the light of the new economic policy. But they found the subject so complex that they concluded that more meetings of the kind were needed and …
JUST 55 seconds in duration, it left 1,000 people dead. The earthquake, measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale, which devastated the hills of Uttarkashi, Tehri Garhwal and Chamoli districts in UP last October, also left 20 per cent of the houses in the region totally destroyed or severely damaged. What …
TWENTY years after the women of UP's Chamoli district hugged trees to save them from contractors' axes, the echoes of the call "Chipko" still ring in the district's hills. With new challenges to be met, the women's fight to preserve the Himalayan ecology continues. The Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal, which …
JHARKHAND stretches from Bankura district in West Bengal to Surguja in Madhya Pradesh; and from Santhal Parganas of Bihar to Sambhalpur in Orissa. Approximately 1,87,646 sq km in area, it has a population of 30.5 million according to the 1981 census. Adivasis constitute 30 per cent of the population, while …
THE crowd gasps as a sadhu pierces his tongue with a trishul. Chants of awed reverence go up as a baba lights the hawan kunda (sacrificial pyre) with super-natural powers and another passes a flaming torch over his body. It is to expose such miracles and to promote scientific awareness …
RAGHUNATHPUR is a large village of 350 households in the Chanho block of Ranchi district. It lies 55 km from Ranchi on the road to Lohardagga. Though Oraons comprise the majority of the population, this multi-religious village has many non-tribals as well. Being an Oraon village, it was governed by …
"EARTHQUAKES don't kill, buildings do," says John Beynon, principal architect at UNESCO's regional office in Bangkok. Today, people are shifting to "killer buildings" as they give up their traditional building technologies in favour of modern designs and materials. This disastrous transformation has taken place not just in Garhwal, but idso …
JHARKHAND today is closer to reality than it has ever been. This summer saw Jharkhand leaders sweat it out in Delhi while waiting for cabinet committee meetings to decide the issue. They don"t expect the Centre to grant statehood right away. A senior leader puts it this way, "We will …
MAPPING of local natural resources by the villagers is an experiment being tried out by three Kerala organisations: the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), the Centre for Earth Science Studies (CESS) and the Kerala State Land Use Board (KSLUB). Economic growth is unsustainable unless the exploitation of natural resources is …
