Khana, a woman seer and a composer of nature verses lived between 800 and 1200 AD. Her contribution to traditional agriculture of Bengal, India is amazing. Her verses were the most important guidelines for traditional agriculture and in villages, farmers are still following several verses along with present-day modern agricultural practices.

ravi aggarwal, director of ngo Toxic Links, has recently been conferred the who/ifcs (Chemical Safety) Special Recognition Award. He talks to arnab pratim dutta on different aspects of chemical regulation india: There is a hazardous waste law and a hazardous chemical law. But these don

A palm-sized cd has become the prized possession of Jagdish Mehta, the father of social activist Lalit Mehta, who was brutally murdered in Kandra jungles of Palamu district in Jharkhand on May 14. His eyes gleam as he holds the cd in his hands. It contains a record of a damning social audit of an nregs project in Chhatarpur block, and the old man hopes it may one day nail the

The two men profiled here were killed because they worked to take the government rural employment scheme to people for whom it is meant A crusader who fought corruption and took up cudgels against usury and illicit liquor, Orissa

Brazil's environment minister, Marina Silva, quit her post on April 13 in despair over the obstacles she faced in reining in destruction of the Amazon rainforest. In the resignation, Silva said she

PRADIP SAHA talks to DILIP CHERIAN, founder and consulting partner of image management firm Perfect Relations, about the clash between public relations and public interest

There is a political process to public policy. Does corporate lobbying go against that democratic norm?

To help understand different viewpoints on the effectiveness of EM (Effective Micro-organism), LEISA asked two professionals for their opinion. Dr. Narayana Reddy is a prize-winning organic farmer (who made the transition from conventional agriculture in 1980), writer and trainer from Bangalore, India. Dr. Ken Giller is professor of Plant Production Systems at the University of Wageningen, the Netherlands, and has extensive experience in soil microbiology research with microbial inoculants.

coastal campaign: The National Fishworker's Forum began a two-month campaign in Gujarat to draw public attention to the centre's move to dilute Coastal Regulation Zone Notification, 1991, and

When Edzard Ernst became the UK's first professor of complementary medicine, he was attacked by both alternative therapists and conventional doctors. The doctors have come round, but he is now alternative medicine's public enemy number one after sticking the needle into everything from acupuncture to homeopathy. He insists he is just being a good scientist, but it has been a long journey for someone whose family doctor was a homeopath.

The former Liberian President Charles Taylor ordered militias to eat the flesh of their enemies, a former death squad leader has told during his war crimes trial. Joseph "Zigzag' Marzah said

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