India

Satwant Reddy committee: Report of the committee on the pesticide residue in packaged drinking water and packaged natural mineral water.

Setting standards

As per Article 7 of the Stockholm Convention, countries are required to develop the National Implementation Plan (NIP) of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) to demonstrate how the obligations under the Convention would be implemented. The Convention was adopted with the objective of protecting human health and the environment from POPs and came into force from April 2006 in India.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests, which is the nodal ministry for the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and Stockholm Convention in India has prepared a NIP and has committed itself to its implementation subject to adequate assistance. It has had to harmonize the interests and stand points of different sectors involved and thereafter determine the position of the Indian government.

India understands that compliance with the obligations on Parties set out in the Convention will have a significant and positive influence not only on India‘s own chemicals management regime but also on the ultimate global success of the Convention. Since among the POPs only Dichloro Diphenyl Trichloroethane (DDT) and Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) are used in the country the inventory concentrated on DDT storages and facilities where PCB-containing electrical equipment was found.

Here the yields of crops grown by low-cost inputs including plant biomass are compared with chemical fertiliser-induced production.

The study was conducted over 1999-2004, and the findings conclude that the yields of low intensive biological farming are as good, if not better than chemical fertiliser intensive farming.

The fundamental right to water in rural areas is well-established in India, but the actual content of this right has not been elaborated upon in judicial decisions. There is no general drinking water legislation that would provide this missing content.

“Agricultural Statistics at a Glance 2010”  is compiled by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Department of Agriculture and Cooperation. It provides a wide range of data on outlays, expenditure and capital formation, crop production and productivity across States, markets and prices, terms of trade, price support and procurement, domestic and international trade, credit, insurance etc.,

Timely availability of reliable information on agricultural output and other related aspects is of great significance for planning and policy making particularly, in the management of concerns in areas such as food security, price stability, international trade etc. The information is extremely useful in identifying problem areas and the nature of required intervention in terms of spatial, temporal and qualitative inferences. The handbook presents a comprehensive picture of the progress made by the agriculture sector at the All India level as well as across the States. 

This paper discusses the need to shift from chemical intensive agriculture to organic farming. The authors in their vision for a chemical-free agriculture also stress that organic agriculture is a way to achieve food security.

The authors begin with the current crisis in Indian agriculture. Stating that though the Green Revolution made India self-sufficient in food production in the shortest time it also resulted in a host of problems. The indiscriminate use of fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides has created problems of decline in the soil fertility, pollution of water resources, and chemical contamination of food grains, amongst the many similar issues now linked to the Green Revolution.

These two reports discuss the dependency of agriculture on phosphorous and the ways to mitigate the problem.

The first report looks at agricultural dependence of chemical nutrients on a global scale and even discusses the potential international political fallout of a reduction in phosphorous. The second report is focused on ways to tackle the dependency on this mineral, in the Indian context. However, both speak of the need for finding alternatives to the current methods of obtaining phosphorous, which is largely through mining.

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)organised the Water India conference, around the theme “Transforming the municipal and industrial water landscape - Issues, challenges and opportunities".

 But as you may recall as it was reported before on this forum that his son died in need of attention when he was still struggling to get his wages.

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