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Cover Story

Teasing death

The trials run before introducing drugs into the market are peppered with death-inviting inaccuracies and even brazen lies

News

No-budging budget

Beneath the gloss of populist governmental rhetoric, this year's budget is a dead loss

Laying India to waste

Greenpeace sounds a red alert about toxic waste imports into India at workshops across the country

Patent problems

An surge of gene patents in Europe threatens to overwhelm the law

Volte face

The Nepal Communist Party government okays the Arun project the party had earlier panned

Tangled nets

A skirmish over fishing rights threatens to scuttle diplomatic relations between Canada and the European Community

Market trade-off

Following stricter trade sanctions by the US on medical supplies, the Cuban health system is going into a coma

Journos access sci-tech

A new science and technology info system bails out mediapeople

Interview

'The aim of the restructuring is to create a lean, cost-efficient secretariat'

DECENTRALISATION is the new watchword at World Wide Fund for Nature International's (WWFI) headquarters at Gland, Switzerland. A restructuring effort by the management in mid-Ja...

Science & Technology

New light on the past

Latest technologies are set to bring a sea change in the field of archaeology and anthropology

Blood read

A new instrument measures the concentration of haemoglobin in the blood

Monumental screening

The history of Humayun's Tomb has been captured on a software programme

Hot superconductivity

The many applications of high-temperature superconductors

...or how to use garbage to generate power

Fast talk

A new class of materials could make for quicker telecommunication

Rugged robots

Hybrid materials

Weather forecast

Salivary safeguard

Computerised conception

DDT use endorsed

Analysis

How to be a glutton and bloom with health

How what you tuck into can pull you back from the brink of death

Teasing death

The trials run before introducing drugs into the market are peppered with death-inviting inaccuracies and even brazen lies

Special Report

Highways of death

High risk levels and pathetically inadequate disaster management plans tar Indian roads as danger zones

Writing off the world's forests

As the global demand for paper rockets, forests in the Asia-Pacific are being targeted for paper plantations

The Fortnight

Bum deal at the summit

A lot of sound and fury signifying nothing: that was the Social Development battlefield at Copenhagen

Top quark nabbed

Pollution tax

Gas bombs

Berg break

Stranglehold on habitats

Fishing fetters

A boost for genetic research

MONEYMAKERS

RED SEA

JAPAN

AUSTRALIA

YEMEN / SAUDI ARABIA

AUSTRELIA

TANZANIA

SLUG

CHILE

COLOMBIA

UNITED NATIONS

PAKISTAN

BANGLADESH

PAKISTAN ( CDA)

Toxic salt o' the earth

Breast milk ban uproar

Budget buzz

Inhaling death

Hurtling downhill

Butterfly blues

FISHING BATTLE

DOCTORED ETHICS

COURT STRICTURE

FLOODED RICE

POISON ALGAE

INSANE VIRUS

Waste dumping opposed

Sulabh scheme takes flak

INDIA

Leader

Exhausting the options

ENVIRONMENTAL problems, like other real-world concerns, never make for soft solutions. Even on the eve of its implementation, the laudable scheme whereby all new cars registered in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras will be mandatorily equipped with catalytic converters was dogged by controversy. Telltale ironies about April 1, Fool's Day, the designated date for the measure to come into force, are not quite as facetious as they may first seem.

Mean streets

GRUESOME highway accidents are so common in India that they are routinely relegated to the inside pages of newspapers. But the month of March took, as it were, the cake (see pages 18-19): in the first, which occurred outside Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, 22 people died of concentrated sulphuric acid burns carried on a truck that was giving them an illegal paid lift.

Crosscurrent

Earth health

Clinically clean, gleamingly coloured, hermetically sealed fruits and vegetables face the challenge of organic food

A fluid paradox

International aid agencies and local people do not agree on what tastes like real water

Review

Water management outpourings

ONE of the major criticisms against large surface irrigation projects was the way the water was mismanaged, leading to conflict between head- and tail-end users, waterlogging and soil salinity.

In most cases in India, farmers either do not pay a water tariff or pay only a token amount. Further, there is a gross underutilisation of the irrigation potential. What we need is to increase the efficiency of the already-established irrigation potential, and to harness water in a manner which will be sustainable and will not damage the fragile agricultural lands.

Ancient tribe, modern manners'

There exists a canon of empirical literature on Indian tribes. But there has been no adequate explanation of the present status and the process of change of these societies.

This well-written and well-researched book by Bikram Nanda has "tried to clear the ground for the search for a perspective with which to approach the social reality of tribal formations". It is a narrative about the relatively unknown Bonda highlanders in the hills of Koraput in South Orissa.

Reverent reference

THE rootless post-modernist, lost in exhausting productivity and mindless consumerism, has been forced to wake up to the severe erosion of the environment. But despite the host of developmental alternatives, he is unable to stop the rapacious consumption by policymakers and the public at large. The result: a rapidly shrivelling planet constantly denuded of its vital non-renewable resources.

How green was the revolution

THIS is a collecton of papers originating from a study of the North Arcot district in the early '80s, undertaken under the auspices of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to assess the impact of technological change in agriculture.

Education entertainment: green soaps

INFUSING public interest messages into soap operas, television's most popular programmes, requires a delicate balance between entertainment and education. The telenovellas of Mexico's Televisa and Brazil's Globe TV are regarded by communication specialists as models for development-oriented soap operas.

Deserted wellbeing

After the successful release of his book, Aaj Bhi Khare Hain Talab, Anupam Mishra of the Gandhi Peace Foundation will soon release Rajasthan ki Rajat Bunde, based on 10 years of research on the traditional water harvesting systems of Rajasthan.

Family tree

IN AN appeal to save the planet, law students of the Delhi-based Centre for Environmental Law enacted Vasundhra (Earth), at their convocation ceremony. The play, directed by Amitava Dasgupta, was a hit with the audience.

Grassroots

What car is this anyway?

Can a pumpset metamorphose into a motor vehicle? Somewhere out there in Haryana,they call this smoke-belching, spit-and-gum contraption a Maruta

Tanking up on water

Renovating traditiona_1 village reservoirs, farmers in Tamil Nadu are pursuing a green dream

Ground truths

Villagers in Nepal flummox experts by 'reading' satellite images

Letters

Elementary problem

I read the article, Elementary order (Down To Earth, January 15, 1995), in which certain facts have not been presented properly.

The Periodic Table is the long form, also called the Modern Periodic Table and not the Mendeleev (and certainly not the Medekeyev) Periodic table, and is incompelete without numbering the columns in it. There is mention of the Modern Periodic Table in the text. The accepted IUPAC recommendation says that 18 columns be numbered from 1 to 18 and the earlier notataion of 1a, 1b, IIa, IIb, etc, be given up.

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