Reply affidavit on behalf of the Central Ground Water Board in the matter of Suo Moto case titled "Haryana 60.48% groundwater over exploited Kurukshetra worst Jhajjar best says" appearing in the Tribune, January 8, 2025. The CGWA report, May 3, 2025 addresses the issue of groundwater exploitation and violation of …
Alarm has been sounded by the us Agriculture Department (usad) which, in its crop report for June, says that the world grain carryover stocks for 1996 are about to crashland to a record low level -- worth a mere 52 days of consumption. According to Lester R Brown, president of …
THE heat wave that sent a large part of North India to the sick bed proved to be an occasion for joy to farmers in the Punjab-Haryana belt: it melted snow at the sources of the rivers in the northwest, which will fill the reservoirs at the Bhakra Nangal and …
One of the oldest games that we have played has been agriculture, where man has manipulated nature to his own advantage for over 5,000 years. But the game has hardly begun. Agriculture is the latest of the applied molecular sciences, where all the powers of the chemist and biologist will …
Jeremy Rifkin's forthcoming book, The End of Work, is an effort to find an answer to the question of persistent growing unemployment in the developed countries, despite growing productivity and output. The reason, according to Rifkin, lies squarely at the doors of technological development such as computerisation, automation and biotechnology. …
IT IS a profoundly unhealthy world we occupy today. THE World Health Report, 1995 brought out by the World Health Organization, Geneva, reveals that about 51 million people died in 1993 worldwide: about 39 million in the developing world, about 12 million in the developed. Infectious and parasitic diseases were …
EVEN the master organ - the brain - can at times get fooled. Sometimes a person feels that a limb that had been amputated is still there but is paralysed. The patient can actually feel all the parts of the phantom limb but cannot move it and this causes extreme …
Common garden snails, a cherished culinary delight in Vietnam, are now becoming a major agricultural menace. Billions of snails -- particularly the big, imported, tea-cup sized gastropods known as golden snails -- are eating their way through the rice paddies that form the nation's mainstay. Scientists have determined that 8 …
The world is heading towards a water crisis. The doubling of the world's population between 1940 and 1990 has led to a doubling in per capita use of water, from 400 to 800 cubic metres per person per annum. The result: global use of water quadrapled. Africa and West Asia …
AFTER cashmere, alpaca and mohair, the latest fad in the global textile market may well be recycled plastic clothes. Going by the recent developments in the chemical and textile industries, it may not be long before a sweater or a jacket made from recycled plastic bottles becomes an essential fashion …
A 12- nation African group headed by Zambia and Namibia is gunning for Hiroshi Nakajima, the World Health Organization (WHO) chief. Nakajima has offended the Africans by allegedly making some unpardonable remarks about them at a WHO staff meeting. He reportedly objected to transferring Africans to WHO headquarters, invoking problems …
The 1993-94 Annual Review and Assessment of the World Tropical Timber Situation reports that declining global production and imports have increased the chasm between exports and imports to over 5.8 million metres cube. Resource scarce, tropical timber exporting countries like India and Thailand have now become net importers. With Asian …
A computer chess programme called WChess swaggered through unbeaten at the Fifth Harvard Cup Human vs Computer Intel Chess Challenge. The programme, developed by D Kittinger, scored 4 wins and 2 draws (Communications of ACM, Vol 37, No 12). With 6 grandmasters pitted against 8 computer programmes, the humans outwitted …
The endangered Caspian Sea may just get a new lease of life: 5 countries ringing the sea - Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Iran - have jointly decided to draw up an environmental action plan to protect the waterbody from pollution, oil projects and illegal fishing. The major threat to …
"RESFARCH whaling" is malignantly alive in Japan. In mid-April, a Japanese factory ship, the Nisshin Maru, returned to Tokyo with 330 minke whales harpooned in the Antarctic during this year's "research mission". Japan has earned worldwide notoriety for sickeningly indiscriminate whale slaughter. It has killed since 1987 about 300 minke …
SITA Ram Yadav's woes know no bounds. "They had promised to make the area as fertile as Punjab, but they have reduced my field to a total wasteland," fumes the lanky farmer from Ajahara village, Phulpur, Uttar Pradesh. His ire is directed against Asia's largest fertiliser cooperative, the Indian Farmers …
Farmers in the developing world are in for tough times ahead. A 1994 Food and Agricultural Organization publication titled Medium- Term Prospects for Agricultural Commodities warns that the rate of trade growth for food and agricultural commodities during the '90s is likely to be less than half the rate of …
The US Food and Drug Agency recently approved Naltrexone -- a medicine to cure alcoholism. The effectiveness of the drug was studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, USA. Naltrexone reduces alcohol-induced euphoria brought about by the body's endorphins and suppresses the craving to drink more. By mimicking …
Sweating it out in daily traffic jams is worth the trouble if that saves Egypt's national treasure and the only surviving wonder of the world - the 4,500-year-old Giza pyramids; Cairo's residents feel. Egypt and the United Nations have agreed to reroute a nearly complete highway which passes within km …
AGRICULTURE ministers of the European Community (EC) member-nations seem extremely reluctant to go ahead with their proposed "green agenda" at the cost of offending the farming population. At the 2-day farm council meeting at Luxembourg, they put off the decision to implement rate changes in the green currency system, agreeing …
Researchers at the us Agriculture Department claim that pest population in grain stores can be controlled by increasing the population of a tiny insect-eating bug. Lycotcoris Campestris -- the larger pirate bug -- is found in grain stores thriving on the insects that thrive on grain. According to entomologist Thomas …
