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Showing posts from July, 2011

Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act

he Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act  or  Right to Education Act (RTE) , which was passed by the  Indian parliament  on 4 August 2009, describes the modalities of the provision of free and compulsory education for children between 6 and 14 in India  under Article 21A of the  Indian Constitution . India became one of 135 countries to make education a fundamental right of every child when the act came into force on 1 April 2010. History The present Act has its history in the drafting of the Indian constitution at the time of Independence  but are more specifically to the Constitutional Amendment that included the Article 21A in the Indian constitution making Education a fundamental Right. This amendment, however, specified the need for a legislation to describe the mode of implementation of the same which necessitated the drafting of a separate Education Bill. The rough draft of the bill was composed in year 2005. It received ...

2nd World seed Conference 2009

M S Swaminathan Professor M S Swaminathan has been acclaimed by TIME magazine as one of the twenty most influential Asians of the 20thcentury and one of the only three from India, the other two being Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. He has been described by the United Nations Environment Programme as "the Father of Economic Ecology" and by Javier Perez de Cuellar, Secretary General of the United Nations, as "a living legend who will go into the annals of history as a world scientist of rare distinction". He was Chairman of the UN Science Advisory Committee set up in 1980 to take follow-up action on the Vienna Plan of Action. He has also served as Independent Chairman of the FAO Council and President of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. He also served as President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (2002-07) and President of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (2005-07)....

M S Swaminathan Research Foundation Center for Research on Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development

M S Swaminathan Research Foundation is a non-profit research organization and was established in 1988. M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) has all along been developing and following a pro-nature, pro-poor, pro-women and pro-sustainable on-farm and non-farm livelihoods through appropriate ecotechnology and knowledge empowerment. M S Swaminathan Research Foundation is carrying out research and development in six major thematic areas such as Coastal Systems Research (restoration of mangrove forests, alternative livelihood for fishing community, etc.), Biotechnology (developing salt and drought tolerant transgenic rice varieties, testing availability of oil content in different biofuel crops / plants, lichens diversity, etc.), Biodiversity (documenting endangered and medicinal plants, providing necessary training to village community to maintain biodiversity register, conserving genes and seeds through ex-situ community based gene bank, and in-situ on-farm conservation etc.), Ecot...

Food Security

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Influenced by prominent English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), people in the nineteenth century began to fear that the planet Earth might not produce enough food for its growing population. Yet it turns out that Malthus was wrong. Although the world's population grew from 1 billion (in 1804) to 6 billion (in 1999), a global food shortage failed to materialize. Agricultural machinery, artificial fertilizers, and improved seeds were among the many products that were invented or developed to help accommodate the growing population. Of course, now as it was then, there are many hungry people in the world. Living mainly in the  developing countries  , a third of the world's current population, or about 2 billion people, are considered undernourished. Of those, about 500 million children suffer from inadequate or unbalanced diets. Green Revolution Throughout the 1960s and 1970s there occurred a "Green Revolution" in which scientists, through selective plant breedi...