Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of News Item titled "Telangana: Deepening pollution crisis in Godawari threatens lives livelihoods appearing in the Telangana Today dated 13.05.2025" dated 29/05/2025. The application was registered suo-motu on the basis of the news item titled Telangana: Deepening pollution crisis in Godawari …
DUTCH elm disease (DED), a dreaded fungal disease that afflicts elm trees, has had a ghastly record. Spread by bark beetles, DED has wiped out tens of millions of trees around the world. It first appeared in the Netherlands in 1917, from where DED reached the UK through infected elm …
PANIC gripped farmers of Amritsar and Gurdaspur districts of Punjab, when a deadly disease afflicted their paddy crop. Agriculture experts are still probing the mysterious epidemic, first noticed in Gurdaspur two years ago. The epidemic, which is reffered to as "jaundice'", first turns the crop pale yellow, and then a …
Genetically engineered potatoes and tobacco plants would now save themselves from four major fungal diseases. Matteo Lorito of the Federico II University of Naples and his colleagues have equipped these plants with a gene which helps make a powerful anti-fungal endochiti-nase. This enzyme digests fungal cell walls and other structures …
The sal forests of Madhya Pradesh are once again facing problems. With the monsoons, there is a renewed onslaught of the sal borer beetle, Hoplocerambix spinicornis, which created havoc in 1997 by infecting more than 31 lakh sal trees worth Rs 1,200 crore. The sal borer epidemic in Madhya Pradesh …
Pests have attacked the Irri-Boro fields in Thakurgaon, Bengal, thus affecting the possibility of a good crop. In the early stage of the crops, pests called majra attacked the leave of the plant thereby hampering the growth of the corn-stalk. Another pest, hispa, attacked paddy plants sucking the juice and …
A new, aggressive strain of the dreaded potato disease late blight ( Phytophthora infestans ) is devastating potatoes and tomatoes throughout the US and eastern Canada, warn American scientists. The fungus was thought responsible for the disastrous Irish potato famine in the 1840s. William Fry at Cornell University in New …
researchers in the us have identified several seed varieties that are resistant to ozone damage. The findings would help farmers to select crop seeds that are less susceptible to damage from ground-level ozone. Scientists at the us Department of Agriculture's ( usda ) research center, Beltsville, Maryland, have found that …
A genetically engineered strain of cereal has been developed that is resistant to rice tungro disease. If this viral infection breaks out, it can destroy nearly 90 per cent of a crop. A team of researchers led by Roger Beachy of the International Laboratory for Tropical Agricultural Biotechnology at the …
LATE-BLIGHT, a fungus that destroys potatoes, which had been neutralised decades back, may play havoc with crops in Europe once again. Researchers in southwest Scotland are about to infect a crop of potato hybrids with late-blight to see whether they can resist the disease. (New Scientist, Vol 154, No 2079) …
genetic studies at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (ccmb) in Hyderabad has thrown up interesting results on the rice plant. One finding says that the 'leaf blight' might not have come from outside the country, but may well have existed in indigenous wild rices. The rice plant is …
behind their facade of apparent passivity, plants possess a sophisticated behavioural repertoire. In particular, they respond to pathogens by mounting a variety of self-protection measures. Recent work by Sreeganga Chandra and colleagues at Purdue University, us, provides an insight into the method by which plants resist microbial infection (Proceedings of …
The World Bank has sponsored an international project aimed at developing disease-free bananas involving researchers from Australia, the US and Belgium. James Dale of Queensland University of Technology heads the operation in Australia. His research ear-lier had led to the discovery of banana bunchy top, a major destructive virus in …
A FUNGUS that virtually eats into every conceivable part of the, rubber tree - Hevea brasiliensis - has finally met its match in an environment-friendly deterrent. Researchers from the Rubber Research Institute, (RRI) in Kottayam, Kerala, have developed a new ecofriendly fungicide from wood extracts of five locally available tree. …
THE bullets were not meant to kill rice cells; they were aimed to impart resistance in them to fight off a destructive menace - bacterial leaf blight, a disease that routinely destroys rice crops around the world. Researchers led by Pamela Ronald from the University of California, us, recently performed …
TWO groups of scientists have developed techniques to genetically alter banana (Musa species) cells to make the plant disease- resistant and introduce other improvements in it. This is significant when one considers that in some areas of the world up to half the banana yield is lost to fungal and …
US scientists have found what makes fruits such as bananas, avocados and tomatoes, vulnerable to fungal diseases that destroy up to 50 per cent of the produce post-harvest. Moshe Flaishman and Pappachan Kolatukuddy from Ohio State University's Biotechnology Center found that the hormone that triggers the ripening of fruit also …
INDIAN agricultural scientists have virtually given up trying to contain the spread of an American pest that sneaked into India about two years ago. G C Tewari of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), who first studied the pest, now says, "We will have to live with the pest. …
PAKISTAN'S cotton crop will reach the target of 960 million kg despite the locust threat and reports of a virus attack, according to the country's central cotton committee. The final output, however, will depend on the extent to which Pakistan is able to mitigate the damage from the locust attack. …
PICTURE this: One species invades another to sponge off it and then alters the victim's basic characteristics so it cannot reproduce itself. Finally, the victim adds insult to injury by exploiting the victim's altered biology to perpetuate itself. Bizarre, yes. But this is precisely what happens when Puccinia monoica -- …
"EMPTY boxes, empty promises", read a sign put up by the Washington Apple Commission, to protest against Japan's "unfair" ban on American apples, at a recent food exhibition in Osaka. The organisation that represents growers producing 60 per cent of the US apple crop said Japan has been rejecting import …
