Judgment of the Supreme Court in the matter of In Re: Zudpi Jungle Lands. A batch of applications involved a peculiar issue concerning the situation prevailing in the six districts of eastern Vidarbha region namely Nagpur, Wardha, Bhandara, Gondia, Chandrapur and Gadchiroli. The issue pertains to the status of the …
What are you trying to achieve through the FRLHT database? We are trying to focus on the relevance of the knowledge and resource base of the Indian medical heritage. We can strengthen the resource base of the traditional knowledge system by using the FRLHT database. A lot of people talk …
TRADITIONAL systems of biological resource use are staging a comeback after having taken a beating from the invasion of technology, capital intensive systems of use and catastrophic erosion of our biological resource base. The time is now ripe to consider the feasibility of promoting traditional systems in terms of tangible …
RAMPACHODAVARAM in the Eastern Ghats of the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh is where the Rampa Rebellion of 1879 started. Well-known in official circles as a punishment posting, these places have, of late, become challenging, especially for police personnel brought in to check growing Naxalite activities in the hills. …
THE tireless cliche that India lives in its villages has been open to gross political abuse. So much so that our plans for our cities have been victims of feeble-mindedness. The Nagar Palika Bill, which came through as the 74th Amendment in 1992 and was enforced through Presidential notification on …
BIOTECHNOLOGY has been occasionally caught giving itself a pat on the back and parrying questions of ethics by flaunting its effects on crop production, rice included. The information contained in this book is a first-hand account of the various directions in which rice biotechnology has grown, an overview of the …
WHEN you live on an island, rapid land erosion can spell doom. It can also mean an irreversible and mind-numbing change in the status of your assets from the time you go to sleep to the time you wake up. If this sounds stretches the limits of understanding, just watch …
P D BAPNA is the owner of a 20-ha sapota (cheeku or sapodilla plum) orchard in the Dahanu area of Maharashtra. Back in the '60s, like other growers, Bapna used chemical fertilisers. But in 1975, after his plants became weak and prone to disease, "perhaps because of the over-exploitation of …
WHEN 15th century Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sailed to India, he got stuck on Africa's east coast and had to seek the help of a Gujarati navigator to cross the Indian Ocean. According to Varadarajan, as early as the Rig Vedic period (circa 2500 BC), there are references to …
TELANGWADI village in the Solapur district of western Maharashtra is located on undulating and rocky terrain and receives little rainfall. Farmers who are lucky enough to have irrigation cultivate inferior cereals like jowar, bajra and maize and fruits like pomegranates. This barren area is the setting for the success story …
IN ASIA'S social hierarchy, the status of fishing and maritime communities has always been low. Seventeenth century British trader Thomas Bowrey records how the fishing caste on the Coromandel coast in the east called machua (mukkuvar in modern Tamil) was regarded as the lowest of the Hindu untouchables and lived …
EIGHTY-year-old Ganapathyrao Mhetre has a fondness for grapes. He is an avid collector of books and journals on grape cultivation. And since 1991, he has experimented with cultivating them organically. The idea of going organic occurred to Mhetre because the land around Tasgaon in Maharashtra's Sangli district, where he owns …
BOMBAY'S Prince of Wales Museum is one of the few in the country that maintains a gallery devoted to maritime history. The gallery is a repository of models, original charts and artefacts that catch the eye of even the casual visitor. The Indian Navy launched a floating museum on the …
DAY after day last February, scores of students in an Uttar Pradesh village spent hours outside their classrooms. They were not playing truant -- they were in the fields collecting leaves and plants for a biodiversity competition. The contest at the secondary school in Gangagarh village in Bulandshahr district was …
THE Son Kolis are an ancient maritime hunter-gatherer group living along the Konkan coast of Maharashtra. They are fisherfolk whose lives even today revolve around boats, nets and an uncertain sea. According to Kirti Jain, a researcher in Deccan College in Pune, the word koli possibly originates from kul, Sanskrit …
How do you know the uses of these ? Did you take help? I am from this area and know about these plants -- I see them being used everyday. I also asked my father and brothers and the elders in my neighbourhood. Even though my brothers don't go to …
THE masulas are a family of boats now used exclusively for fishing. Masula seems to be a European term for the sewn boat of India's east coast, which is known as padagu in Tamil and padava in Telugu. The European name may have originated from the town of Masulipatnam, now …
Waste has become a global problem, and is demanding curative technologies that require almost preternatural efficiency to execute. And that keep collapsing nevertheless. Duales System Deutschland, Germany's hyped-up recycling programme for packaging material, for instance, burst almost immediately after it boomed, bloated with more quantities of junk than it was …
IN A sharp policy departure from the norm, the Clinton administration has proposed banning exports of all hazardous wastes outside North America. If the US Congress approves, it will overturn a tradition of steadfastly parrying moves to curb waste dumping on developing countries. However, there is a catch. As Carol …
THERE are several kinds of toxic wastes that are dumped in Asia. According to Greenpeace, among the noxious wastes that have been shipped to Asia since 1990 are aluminium, cadmium, copper, nickel, tin, zinc, other non-ferrous and ferrous metals, ash and residues, computer scrap, plastic, medical and radioactive wastes. The …
VARIOUS boat-building technologies abound in the Indian Ocean area: single-log boats and those made of planks glued together. The most striking, however, is the "sewn boat", in which planks of wood are actually sewn together. The most commonly used materials for stitching the planks, both in the past and now, …
