Agricultural production in India has increased through green renaissance, growing high-yielding varieties of crops and adopting scientifically improved soil fertility management, water management, plant protection and crop husbandry technologies during the past three decades.
Integrated approach

Some interesting insights into what citizens think of the Delhi Master Plan-2021(MPD-2021) and how it impacts them, its errors and failures, and ways to improve and streamline it can be gleaned from the 500 suggestions received from the public that have now been uploaded on the Delhi Development Authority's website as part of the ongoing review of the Master Plan.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi on Wednesday announced budget estimates for the year 2012-13, significantly increasing the councillors' funds in all the wards and focusing on improvement and development of roads and existing infrastructure. With the MCD headed for a split this coming April, Leader of the House Subhash Arya presented the budget saying that future corporations will abide by the allocations.

Rajasthan will soon accord the bio-diversity rich Jawai Bandh forests in Pali district the status of a conservation reserve. The rich forests and the water bodies along the Jawai dam in Sumerpur tehsil have a large presence of crocodiles. The wildlife census in 2011 had put their number at 288.

Prof. Tapas Kumar Kundu of Bangalore-based Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research has won the G. D. Birla Award for his contributions in the field of bio-chemistry. The award, instituted by the K. K. Birla Foundation to accord recognition to high-calibre scientific research undertaken by Indian scientists below the age of 50, carries Rs.1.50 lakh in cash. — PTI

China recently released a set of “world's highest resolution” lunar images taken by its second moon orbiter, Chang'e-2, as it braces to launch its next mission to land a rover to explore its surface. China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) recently published a set of full coverage map of the Moon and its images with a resolution of seven meters captured by Chang'e-2.

A Russian team has succeeded in drilling through four kilometres (2.5 miles) of ice to the surface of a mythical subglacial Antarctic lake which could hold as yet unknown life forms, reports said Monday. Lake Vostok is the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica and scientists want to study its eco-system which has been isolated for hundreds of thousands of years under the ice in the hope of finding previously unknown microbiological life forms.
Surface reached

Three years after the entire tiger population of the Panna Tiger Reserve was decimated, the Madhya Pradesh government has neither been able to fix responsibility for the disaster, nor has it handed over the enquiry to the Central Bureau of Investigation inspite of requests from the Ministry of Environment and forests and even the Prime Minister's Office.

Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar today said it will be difficult to implement the proposed Food Security Act with existing distribution system and suggested massive reforms.

“I will be failing in my duty if I do not emphasise the fact that the Food Security Act will never succeed in achieving its goal in letter and spirit, if we try to push the same through the existing PDS apparatus,” Mr. Pawar said at a conference here.

Finally it is victory for environmentalists, especially for Dharwad-based NGO Samaja Parivartana Samudaya, which questioned the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education's (ICFRE) suggestion to exploit mining reserves in the Western Ghats.

The Supreme Court-appointed Central Empowered Committee (CEC) in its report submitted to the court on February 3 rejected the suggestion by noting that “ICFRE has gone totally out of context and beyond its terms of reference.”