Agricultural growth in India has always laboured under the burden of producing more. The idea was: grow only foodgrains. That meant: not ecologically adapted cereals such as millets, but rice and
A third factor has led to the current debility of soils in India: irrigation. That is to say, water over-use. To feed the rice-wheat mentality, net irrigated area rose from 20.8 million ha in 1950 to
Soils are a very slow renewable resource. To reclaim them requires, above all, a long-term plan. With falling productivity, the realisation has sunk in that soils cannot be blindly mined, and that
A COMPREHENSIVE database on legumes, the first of its kind in South Asia is being set up by Sudershan Kumar, a researcher at the National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow. The bean family,
Pongamia (Indian beech) is a non-edible oil-producing tree legume (Syn: Pongamia glabra Vent.), that has recently gained importance for its oil utility as biodiesel1. Various parts of Pongamia are used in medicinal and other applications
