Crop insurance has always been a knotty issue with the two previous ones, National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (NIAS) of 1999 and the Modified NAIS of 2010 failing to address the concerns.

A fresh controversy is brewing over the way the Centre is planning to clear the “diversion” of a whopping 19,256 hectares of reserve forest area in Krishna and Guntur districts for the new capital,

‘Both States will face a challenge in providing water and power to the industry, which will happen at the cost of farmers and common people’

ICAR “shielding errant officials” by delaying the report

In a damning indictment of the way some Bt cotton varieties were developed and commercialised in the country, a committee headed by Prof. S.K. Sopory, Vice-Chancellor of JNU, found that indigenous Bikaneri Nerma (BN) Bt cotton variety was contaminated by a gene patented by Monsanto.

Having found lapses in the “BNLA106 event”, the committee has held as “invalid” the data obtained from bio-safety studies and field trials with BNBt as these were conducted with material that contained Monsanto’s “MON531 event”.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) will soon create a national data base for tigers, the flagship species of India, and each one of the big cats will have a unique identification numb

An e-Atlas of Marine-Important Bird Areas , was launched by the BirdLife International at the ongoing 11th Conference of the Parties (COP11) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) here on

Ecosystem restoration and relationship between biodiversity and climate change to be discussed

The difficult task of mobilising financial resources for achieving biodiversity targets expeditiously became the running theme at the 11th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP-11) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), represented by over 170 countries, which began here on Monday. Union Environment and Forests Minister Jayanthi Natarajan, who assumed charge as president of COP-11 for the next two years, set the tone for the meeting and said resource mobilisation was the most important unfinished agenda that was inherited from COP-10.

From being a much sought-after delicacy found in abundance in the Godavari and Krishna rivers, to figuring in the global IUCN Red List of threatened species, the fringed-lipped carp (Labeo fimbriatus) has been hunted almost to extinction, thanks to unscientific overharvesting.

A serious effort is hence being made by the Andhra Pradesh Biodiversity Board to revive the once-popular fish species by introducing fingerlings this monsoon, to start with, in the Godavari river system in Adilabad district.

A fact-finding team representing a collective of 40 farmers' organisations, Raitu Swarajya Vedika, has found an alarming rise in the number of suicides by farmers — as many as 90 in the last month

Over a third of the Indian pharmacies continue to sell to livestock farmers the banned killer drug, diclofenac, responsible for the dramatic fall in vulture population in the country.