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. …
IN A bid to reverse the ongoing degradation of the Doon valley's environment and preserve its watershed, the Uttar Pradesh government initiated a project in 1993 which seeks to involve the locals in a watershed management scheme. This participatory management programme has not come a day sooner for if the …
In what he calls an attempt to convert "default into advantage". Anil Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management,Gujarat, has initiated a project to map the soil microbial diversity in the state. "There is no genetic map of microbial diversity in the world of even a small area," he claims. …
Flyash, produced in millions of tonnes as a waste by thermal power plants can serve as an excellent soil conditioner, studies at the Central Research Institute, Dhanbad, Bihar, show. The studies confirm that the yield of crops increases by 20-60 per cent on the addition of 25-200 tonnes of flyash …
THE various life-support systems and the socioeconomic development of a country depend majorly on the proper use of soil resources. Maintaining the quality of this resource base is therefore a key issue in ensuring sustainability in agriculture and food and nutritional security for the people of the country. In recent …
The National Bureau of Soil Survey & Land Use Planning (nbss&lup;), Nagpur, has finally completed its work on detailed soil resource mapping (srm) of all the Indian states. J L Sehgal, director, nbss&lup;, says maps for a few states have been released and rest are ready for publishing. srm basically …
IN THE treeless, barren and rocky district of Kutch in Gujarat, the Shree Vivakanand Research and Training Institute (VRTI), or the sanstha as it is known locally, has carved a name for itself in drought relief and ecological regeneration activity. The Kutch region, which is named so because its topography …
THOUGH insecure land tenure is a major cause of natural resource degradation, very little attention has been paid to the role of land tenure in promoting natural resource conservation on private agricultural land. These observations from a walk through a degraded watershed may, however, help demonstrate the importance of secure …
WHEN FORMER Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi announced the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY), he received more brickbats than bouquets from both the media and the intellectuals because they saw in it a populist measure initiated by a beleaguered prime minister to win an election. But there was more to it than …
The current drought has spurred Indian agricultural scientists to formulate guidelines for combating different rain scarcity situations -- when rains start late, when they are less than normal, when they taper off early, and when there is a big break in rainfall in between. This exercise will be the first …
Honey bee THIS honeycomb is at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. The worker bee is Anil Gupta, a professor at the institute who specialises in socio-ecological studies of communities living in dry areas. His product is a publication called Honey Bee: an informal newsletter for documentation and experimentation …
The Climate Change-Biodiversity report of the IPPC (April, 2002) highlights that changing land use and land cover, soil and water/air pollution, diversion of water to intensively managed ecosystems and urban systems, habitat fragmentation, selective exploitation of species, the introduction of non-active species and stratospheric ozone depletion are the consequences of …
