The National Biodiversity Authority has released a new set of rules to manage sharing of benefits generated through the use of biological resources. The Biological Diversity (Access to biological Resources and Knowledge Associated thereto and Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits) Regulation 2025 was approved by the Central government and …
ARCHITECTS hoped to establish mud as a viable building medium when they set out to build the country's first major environmentally-sound building. The mud headquarters in Delhi of Development Alternatives (DA) headquarters was built to prove a point, recalls Shrashtant Patara, a DA architect. "It was one of the first …
S GOPIKRISHNA WARRIER IN 1976, the biogas lab of the Centre for the Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas (ASTRA) was constructed on the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) campus in Bangalore with unique building blocks. They were not conventional kiln-fired bricks but stabilised mud blocks. Fourteen years …
MUD IS a versatile building material that has been used to make some extraordinary architectural marvels -- from 1,000-year-old ksars (forts) in Morocco and 6,000-year-old arches, vaults and domes in the Nile Valley to multi-storeyed houses of adobe, sun-baked bricks of mud and straw, which is the traditional building material …
THE OLD water works of Burhanpur town is an impressive example of Mughal engineering skills. Named for Sheikh Burhanuddin, the town was built in 1400 on the banks of the Tapti in Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh. The founder, Nasir Khan Faruqi, established it as the capital of the Faruqi …
"A plant in the backyard has no value," says an Indian proverb. This attitude, which has been the bane of Indian society -- and that of the nations of the South -- repeatedly tends to overlook the traditional in pursuit of the modern. These societies often forget that modern technology, …
WHEN I WAS a child, illnesses in traditional Indian families were not remembered as connected with germs, but with events and the suprarational. One heard that at a marriage, somebody's third son broke out with the measles and somebody's aunt sprained her ankle in her anxiety to catch a glimpse …
Farm forestry was promoted in India in the late 1970s to produce fuelwood for rural consumption. The program was immensly successful in the green revolution region in the early 1980s, but farmers produced wood for markets, and not to meet local needs. This market orientation of farmers was recognized in …
THE traditional gharat (water wheel) has caught the technologist's eye and deceptively simple modifications to its design have made it at least 40 per cent more efficient and also enlarged its capability so that it can power several machines simultaneously. The gharat, in use for centuries in the Himalayan region, …
IN THE small workshops of Purani Mandi in Saharanpur, woodcarvers fret, fit and polish their carvings for a revitalised urban market in India and abroad. Their own future, however, is precarious. Spiralling prices of fast-depleting raw materials and a market controlled by middlemen threaten to choke this once thriving trade. …
SOMEWHERE in the Ayodhya hills of Bengal's Purulia district, a scorpion stung the wits out of me. My adivasi companion, Sukhchand, still in his teens, rubbed a poultice made up of some leaves on the bite and it brought instant relief. I had occasion to remember Sukhchand decades later when …
"EARTHQUAKES don't kill, buildings do," says John Beynon, principal architect at UNESCO's regional office in Bangkok. Today, people are shifting to "killer buildings" as they give up their traditional building technologies in favour of modern designs and materials. This disastrous transformation has taken place not just in Garhwal, but idso …
JUST 55 seconds in duration, it left 1,000 people dead. The earthquake, measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale, which devastated the hills of Uttarkashi, Tehri Garhwal and Chamoli districts in UP last October, also left 20 per cent of the houses in the region totally destroyed or severely damaged. What …
WHILE rice transplantation is a traditional practice in Asia, maize transplantation, a fairly recent technique, is now gaining ground in many countries. The technique helps farmers harvest a third crop in areas where none would have been possible because of a short summer. North Korea has already doubled its maize …
It is popular in periods of Hindu religious fasting like Navratri. It is also commonly found on the shelves of health food stores. But for the tribals in the Sahyadri hills in Maharashtra, buckwheat is a way of life. Unlike in the hilly regions of northern India where kuttu, as …
BIOLOGY Yellow pigment clue to evolution Bilirubin, responsible for the yellowish tinge in the skin, eyes and nails of jaundice patients, has for the first time been identified in plants. The pigment was discovered in Strelitzia reginae Aiton, commonly know as the Bird of Paradise plant. It is indigenous to …
Behind an unmarked door in a Lima suburb, Javier Wong is planning a revolution in more than just stir-fry cooking. In fact the very future of food - and farming - is being re-imagined here in a city where nobody dined out 20 years ago, where there is no national …
In Food or Fuel, the second episode of the Future Food series, Kenyan Farmer and campaigner, Moses Shaha is cynical about ‘biofuels’, energy extracted from crop plants. He journeys through southern Kenya where farmers are starting to grow jatropha, to understand if this biofuel crop is a threat to farmland …
In India Tulika Verma is on a mission to ban junk food from Delhi’s schools – where over one in six schoolchildren are overweight. Western-style diets and processed food are becoming ever more popular in India’s cities, while traditional, healthy, sustainable foods are being forgotten. India’s on the edge of …
Nigerian Minister for Agriculture, Akinwunmi Ayo Adesina believes it is his job to ensure Nigerians eat food grown in Nigeria – and he’s determined to overcome the obstacles to Nigerian self-sufficiency in food production. He has also provoked a debate - on a globalized planet should countries like Nigeria really …
Anupam Mishra born 1948, is an Indian Gandhian, author, journalist, environmentalist, and water conservationist who works on promoting water conservation, water management and traditional rainwater harvesting techniques. He had been awarded the 1996 Indira Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar (IGPP) award instituted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India. …
