Pls publish this as the Goa Govt should take note in terms of allowing construction on precious agri land.
What a calamity! >From Ashley Thu, Dec 24 02:47 AM The government must allocate sufficient resources for transferring close to 25 million hectare of acidic agricultural land, which could be used for augmenting food production in the country, Mangala Rai, the outgoing director general of Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) on Wednesday said. He said that under the 12th Five Year Plan, the government should set aside financial resources for transferring atleast 1.2 million hectare of agricultural land annually for meeting the rising demand for food in the country. Besides acidic or toxic land, the total wasteland is estimated to be around 107 million hectares in the country. "As population grows, there had been increasing pressure on agricultural land which is why we must allocate sufficient resources towards conversion of waste land into agricultural land for significantly increasing food production," Rai said at the 81st AGM of ICAR. He said there are several methods like use of lime and industrial waste into toxic agricultural land for enhancing their qualities. Sharad Pawar, the agriculture minister while speaking at the ICAR AGM said that the research body is at present undertaking a major capacity building exercise to deal with the present and future challenges facing the agriculture sector in the country. "These efforts have resulted in filing of over 50 patents applications from 13 ICAR institutes during the year and two patents applications have entered into national phase in US, France and Japan," Pawar said. Pawar noted that in order to infuse new blood in research efforts, over 430 scientists are being recruited into ICAR. In an effort to build capacity in high-end research such as molecular breeding, genomics and transgenics, bioremediation, nanotechnology, diagnostics etc. scientists from ICAR institutes and teachers from state agricultural universities were trained in best of the laboratories of the world, he said. "Crop improvement programmes resulted in release or identification of 131 varieties of major food crops for different agro-climatic regions of the country, besides a few varieties in plantation and horticultural crops and nearly 7000 tonne of breeder seed of centrally released field crop varieties were produced for distribution among farmers," he said.
