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 colour is unmistakably red. The screaming television advertisements sell a lifestyle that makes red the desirable colour, the lifestyle "we've all been waiting for' and renders drinking Coke from cans a status symbol. The marketing wizards of the multinational company ( mnc ) are scoring big; it has now …
considered the most important annual global conference on water, the Stockholm Water Symposium (sws) is slated to be held in Stockholm, Sweden, from August 4-9. Organised by the Stockholm Water Company, the symposium and the Stockholm Water Prize have been instituted to focus the world's attention on the rapid deterioration …
HARVEST of Rain, conceived by Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, is a cohesive and well-researched film. Its main thrust is the near destruction of traditional methods of storing water as a result of increasing governmental interference. It emphasises the importance of understanding the culture of water and how village societies …
Water for the future will be a vital issue on the agenda of the forthcoming second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements {Habitat 11), to be held in June 3-14 in Istanbul, Turkey. A major challenge faced by the participants will be to arrive at a consensus on how the …
THE meeting of the National Water Resources Council (NWRC), convened by Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao last month, was a total failure, as no decision was taken on any of the long list of important issues. The meeting of this apex policymaking body was convened at the instance of …
RECENT years have witnessed rapid increases in the cost of investment in new irrigation projects, while at the same time, there has been a marked degradation in water quality, a slower growth in crop productivity in irrigated areas and increased competition for water for non-agricultural uses. These developments necessitate clear …
This publication focusses on the Aral Sea crisis - the result of economic processes set in motion by the planners of the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 1950s. It is one of the biggest ecological disasters, second only to Chernobyl, leading to a total collapse of the socio-economic life of …
IT is intriguing to those familiar with the history of water resources in Indore that the city is now being forced to bring in from outside. The wells water and the tanks had been more than adequate once to meet Indore's water needs, Whenever the demand went up, the rulers …
A significant research on traditional water conservation and drinking water system in the parched state of Rajasthan, prominent environmental researcher Anupam Mishra's book gives a detailed and fascinating account of several successful, time tested, community-based practices of that society. Rajasthan is home to the Great Indian Desert, and notches up …
Taiwan's antinuclear activists were recent- ly at their vociferous best. On April 24, 100-odd activists bombed the Taiwan Power Company's building with eggs. The state-run company plans to build a new power plant at Kungliao, 40 km north of Taipei. It is considering tenders for reactors, emergency diesel generators and …
The nations of this region have signalled their refusal to be treated as mere waste dumps. In mid-April, 13 island states, including Australia and New Zealand, agreed to a draft treaty that will ban all chemical and other hazardous wastes from being dumped in, or shipped through, the region. Ratification …
Papua New Guinea's (PNG) prime minister, Julius Chan, has thrown Australian mining companies off guard with an announcement on new resource project regulations. Under the new rules, future projects will have to make a "free" share available to local landowners. "In mining developments ... a 5 per cent share of …
In the aftermath of January's devastating earthquake in Kobe, the Japanese have begun to scrutinise and review disaster management plans that they thought were more than adequate. The major lacuna in post-quake reconstruction, believe Japanese researchers, was the absence of geographical information systems (GIS). As Shigeru Kakumoto, a visiting associate …
THE Centre and the states are at it again, this time over water. The bone of contention: the draft water information bill finalised recently by the Union ministry for water resources (MWR) that seeks to accord the Centre unhindered access to water resources data collected by the state governments. The …
Whether the state government of Lower Saxony in Germany likes it or not, it will be choked with nuclear waste that will not be recycled, but stored instead. Monika Griefahn, the fiery state environment minister was vociferously protesting ever since a nuclear legislation was passed last year declaring that spent …
Members of the Mescalero Apache tribe in New Mexico, us, have successfully warded off an us attempt to turn their land into a radioactive waste dump. In early February, representatives of the tribe voted down a proposal to store several thousand tonnes of spent nuclear fuel rods in the region. …
The ongoing US-Russia joint space programme negotiations are progressing, quite literally, at lightspeed. The 2 countries are now shipping hardware to each other. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) space shuttle and Mir, the decade-old Russian space station in orbit, have a dance ahead of them. The purpose of …
The General Accounting Office GAO in Washington, USA, has set the alarm bells ringing furiously. In a study conducted early this January it has said that the 25,000 tonnes of chemical weapons stockpiled by the US army may explode any time if not disposed off immediately. But the disposal incinerators …
