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. …
On a hot June day in 1981 S Z Qasim, then environment secretary, reached out to answer a telephone. The caller was Indira Gandhi, the prime minister. The conversation was brief and to the point. "Can India reach Antarctica?' asked the prime minister. Qasim, who had only an academic knowledge …
Thirty years after banning manual scavenging under the Night Soil Carrying System Abolition Act, Karnataka is still a fair way away from flushing it out of the system. On April 25, 2003, though, a minuscule step was taken in this direction when the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BMP) inaugurated a mobile …
soil poisoned by lead can be easily decontaminated with the help of composted biosolids (organic residuals produced during wastewater treatment). Over the years the problem has become acute, especially in the case of children determined to taste
It is ironic that while India ranks third in fertiliser use worldwide, it ranks 14 and 16 respectively in the production of rice and wheat. It is even more ironic that India’s fertiliser policy ensures precisely such a result. Fertiliser use in India is dictated by the larger perceived need …
Agricultural growth in India has always laboured under the burden of producing more. The idea was: grow only foodgrains. That meant: not ecologically adapted cereals such as millets, but rice and wheat. The green revolution programme was single-minded: it came up with hyv (high-yielding variety) seeds for rice and wheat …
A third factor has led to the current debility of soils in India: irrigation. That is to say, water over-use. To feed the rice-wheat mentality, net irrigated area rose from 20.8 million ha in 1950 to 53.5 million ha in 1995-1996. Fed on irrigation, the agricultural area grew from a …
Soils are a very slow renewable resource. To reclaim them requires, above all, a long-term plan. With falling productivity, the realisation has sunk in that soils cannot be blindly mined, and that humans cannot just plough through the ecology they interact with. apply gypsum: Seven lakh ha of land in …
What is soil? Nothing but simple clod, always taken for granted. But dig deeper, and you will find that this simple clod generates complex equations of survival and wealth, equity and polity. It is a big little ecological variable. Its influences remain hidden from us. function openpoptable(){ var popurl="http://dte-new/dte-new/html/20030131_cover2.htm" winpops=window.open(popurl,"","width=475,height=500, …
Between July 1997 and November 1997, forest fires on islands in Indonesia created smoke that spread over seven nations and was responsible for a plane crash in Sumatra and an oil vessel collision in the strait of Malacca due to low visibility. If there is a forest, there will be …
breathing toxic chemicals exposes all us citizens to a lifetime cancer risk at least 10 times greater than the level considered acceptable under us federal law, shows a recent assessment of the us Environmental Protection Agency (epa). The epa assessment has been based on emissions data from 1996 because inventories …
Following the conclusion of the un-sponsored talks on Afghanistan in Bonn, unep executive director Klaus Toepfer rightly said environmental issues should form part of the package being considered for the country's rehabilitation. Afghanistan today is at best a relic of years of war litters. The big challenge before the war-ravaged …
Almost 3,000 tonnes of dangerous pesticides stored at nearly 1,000 sites around Ethiopia are threatening the health of millions of people and contaminating the soil and water resources. "These pesticides are time bombs,' says Belay Ejigu, the country's deputy agriculture minister. The pesticides got accumulated due to mismanagement. A severe …
THOUSANDS of small industrial units in developing countries like India do not invest in clean technologies because of prohibitively high costs. Now the Horticulture and Food Research Institute of New Zealand Ltd (HortResearch) has developed a low-cost technology that can help treat contaminated soil and at the same time provide …
Bio-remediation, a process in which bacteria clean contaminated soil and water, is proving useful in cleaning the environment. Says Ryuichiro Kurane of the Industrial Science and Technology Agency, Tokyo, this can be done by increasing the activity of existing bacteria by stimulating them with nutrients such as phosphorus. Another is …
Why are soil micronutrients important in agriculture? Any country can be held to ransom if it does not have food security. We have to take appropriate measures to see that we are self-reliant on the food situation. The soil contains different types of elements which are essential for the development …
in may 1998, the ministry of environment and forests had issued a notification for conservation of the top soil of agricultural land. The draft Gazette notification (No.DL33004/98), dated May 22, 1998, read that no person shall excavate the top soil of agricultural land within 50 km radius of a coal …
IF AN agricultural idea finds favour with farmers, you scarcely need an extension service to ensure its spread. But if it does not find favour, then you can double the size of the extension service and it still will not work - Confucius. Soil conservation efforts started more than 50 …
planting ryegrasses (awned cereal grasses that resemble barley) accelerates the redemption of soil contaminated with polyaromatic hydrocarbons (pahs) and pentachlorophenol (pcp). This was established by a year-long greenhouse study conducted by Phytokinetics Inc, a company based in Logan, Utah, usa. The study was sponsored by the California-based Environment Pro-tection Agency. …
