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Business Standard

  • 'Oil prices won't fall below $100 a barrel'

    Crude oil prices continue to spiral upwards at the slightest inkling of a supply disruption, with most industry experts predicting that prices will only move higher from the current price levels of ar

  • Merchants get more mines than steel firms

    Merchant miners have got almost double the number of iron ore mines than steel makers between 2001 and 2007, which the metal manufacturers think is not in the national interest. Out of 260 iron ore mines, for which the ministry has approved mineral concessions during the period, 172 went to merchant miners, according to information available on the website of the Ministry of Mines. Merchant miners were acquiring these mines mainly for export purposes, without adding value.

  • Trained farmers raised cotton yield

    A training project of Cotton & Allied Products Research Foundation of Cotton Association of India has enabled over 800 farmers to raise crop yield by 15 per cent and cut production cost by 20 per cent, Executive Director O P Agarwal told NewsWire18 today. He said the recently concluded 2007-08 farm training and development project at Chopda taluka in Jalgaon district of Maharashtra benefited 802 farmers through frontline demonstrations covering 1,029 acres.

  • Environmental farce (editorial)

    Given how environmental degradation and rehabilitation of displaced people have become so important, you would think that governments at the centre and in the states would be serious about dealing with these complex issues, deliberating at length about environment clearances and the rehabilitation packages relating to various projects. Yet, the evidence available suggests that the process is as casual and routine-driven as it can be.

  • After Nano, what? (editorial)

    India will choke unless it modernises its city transport systems, and you can't blame the Nano for this. Tata's Nano has set the dovecotes aflutter and reactions are flying in all directions. Some people have hailed it, rightly, as the advent of mobility in India's frozen countryside. Others, wrongly, have denounced it as a bad idea, fearing that these tiny beetles will overwhelm our cities and choke their already badly clogged arteries.

  • Environment protection laws reduced to a travesty of their mandates

    Since 1980, different pieces of legislation have been enacted for environmental conservation. These include the Forest (Conservation) Act (FCA), 1980, the Environmental Protection Act (EPA), 1986 and the Biological Diversity Act (BDA), 2002. These have the potential to strengthen the conservation agenda. But they are at best being used to

  • Biofuels - An Assault on the World's Poor

    Western citizens want to use the limited land to produce ethanol rather than food for the poor.

  • Coal India, IL&FS to float JV

    Coal India Ltd (CIL) and IL&FS Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd (IL&FS IDC), today entered into a memorandum of agreement (MoA) to float a joint venture company, with 50 per cent equity contribution each by the two organisations, to undertake project development for mine, power and other coal-based projects. The MoA document was signed by NC Jha, director (technical) of CIL, and DK Mittal, managing director of IL&FS IDC, at the CIL headquarters in Kolkata today, in presence of CIL Chairman Partha S Bhattacharyya and other officials of the two organisations.

  • Food is a great asset minus fund managers

    Investors can't afford to ignore food. As a hedge against a possible US recession, and direct exposure to rising urbanisation and wealth in Asia, it's an asset class that's tailor-made for the present times. As Jim Rogers of New York-based investment firm Rogers Holdings puts it, "If you're in agriculture, you don't know that there is a recession, you don't care.'' That may be as true for investors in agricultural commodities as it is for farmers, provided the former don't rely on the expertise of fund managers to beat the futures markets.

  • Wooing the aam aadmi

    Surely car owners who get cheap petrol and rich farmers who get free water and power can't be aam? With the general elections due next year, there are obvious pressures on the finance minister to provide goodies for the aam aadmi. There are calls to abandon, or at least postpone by a few years, the fiscal deficit ceilings prescribed by the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, so that funds are not a constraint. (If most of us believe that many politicians are corrupt, they reciprocate by believing that the best way to get the vote is by bribing the voter.) Given the concern about the aam aadmi in the bleeding hearts of our political masters, I have often wondered who exactly this aam aadmi is

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