You may soon find India’s first genetically modified vegetable, Bt brinjal, making its way to your vegetable market.

The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee, which is responsible for approval of proposals relating to release of genetically engineered products, on Wednesday approved the environmental release of the vegetable but it still has to get a nod from the central government.

Many in India are concerned over the harmful effects of the vegetable and question the need for a genetically modified vegetable.

“Bt brinjal should not be launched in the country as the Bt toxin gene produces poison and when it can harm pests, where’s the proof that it won’t be harmful to humans?” says Suman Sahia, Convener of Gene Campaign.

A report by Debi Barker, Executive Director of the International Forum on Globalization, says that genetically modified crops can spread in the environment and contaminate other crops and plants.

Concerns over their effect on wildlife and human health have been expressed all over the globe.

Food policy analyst Devinder Sharma raises a few important questions — “First of all, do we even need Bt brinjal? Why take a risk? Where is the crisis in brinjal production that necessitates it?”

Bollywood filmmakers Mahesh Bhatt and Ajay Kanchan released a documentary in March 2009 called “Poison on Platter” to create awareness about genetically modified products in the public.

“We want to highlight the fact that you cannot tamper with Mother Nature without sensitising the nation first,” Bhatt said.

Do you think genetically modified vegetables are a good idea? 

Will Bt brinjal set a trend and we’ll have other genetically modified vegetable as well?

As a consumer, would you prefer a genetically modified vegetable over a naturally grown one?

The war of words between the billionaire Ambani brothers took an unexpected turn when younger sibling Anil offered an olive branch to elder brother Mukesh in a bid to resolve a feud over the split of the Reliance business empire in 2005.

The widespread coverage the Indian media has given to the squabble between the brothers has led to a debate on social networking sites such as Twitter, with some accusing news organisations of playing host to a reality show or soap opera that stars the Ambani family to boost ratings.

Prominent columnist Vir Sanghvi wrote through his Twitter account virsanghvi: “Do you think some network should plan a reality show on the Ambani battle? Or are they doing it already on the news?”

But the battle between the billionaire Ambani brothers is not a manufactured product for mass entertainment, as it involves two of the world’s wealthiest men and could pose a stumbling block to India’s goal of achieving energy security.

The siblings have been involved in several disputes since the family business was split in 2005 following the death of their father, Dhirubhai Ambani, a legendary Indian business tycoon who built Reliance from scratch.

The latest of these disputes is over a deal for Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries to sell gas to Anil Ambani’s Reliance Natural Resources at below-market rates as agreed in the 2005 family settlement, brokered by their mother Kokilaben.

The dispute has drawn in the government, which claims it is the rightful owner of the gas. The government can also decide who can buy gas and at what price, but it has been accused by Anil Ambani of supporting Reliance Industries.

India’s highest court has not excluded the government from the dispute between the Ambanis’ firms, and will hear the case on Oct. 20.

India, Asia’s third-largest oil consumer and which imports two-thirds of its crude oil, is hoping to reduce its dependence on foreign oil and become a new frontier for oil and gas exploration.

The Indian exploration and production sector will need $40 billion in investments by 2012, the Investment Commission of India estimates, while consultancy KPMG expects the Indian energy sector will require between $120 and $150 billion over 2007 to 2011 as Asia’s third-largest economy expands.

However, India’s latest auction of oil and gas exploration blocks evoked a tepid response, with the government indicating the Ambani dispute may have put off investors.

Now, with the stakes being so high, surely the media cannot be blamed for helping its audience navigate through the twists and turns of the maze that is the Ambani tussle?

Obama has won the Nobel Peace prize.

The citation commends him for calling for a nuclear-weapon free world, emphasising the role of international institutions and preferring dialogue.

Less than a year into his presidency he has yet to implement much of his programme.

“For the time being Obama’s just making proposals. But sometimes the Nobel committee awards the prize to encourage responsible action,” said Poland’s Lech Walesa, a Nobel Peace Laureate.

What does it mean for India to have the most powerful man in the world honoured for his policies?

The policies of the Obama administration are different from those of the George W. Bush era when multilateralism was seen as a liability.

Bush’s ambassador to the U.N. was John R. Bolton whose scepticism towards multilateralism was well known.

Yet Bush helped India get a crucial waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group and was described as the friendliest U.S. President India has had.

Obama on the other hand has called for strengthening nuclear non-proliferation, prompting India to seek clarifications.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, argues in a recent column that Indians find it more difficult to deal with those who they think of as American liberals than the conservatives.

Will we now see a more forceful and active Obama on issues like non-proliferation that India is wary of ?

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has been awarded the chemistry Nobel this year.

He joins a select club of scientists recognised by the Nobel foundation.

But Ramakrishnan joins an even more exclusive group — Indians (by birth) who received such recognition.

The country still awaits a second entry in the most exclusive group — an Indian who gets a Nobel staying and working in India.

So far only C.V. Raman, the founder-member of this club, qualifies.

In the days to come, Indians around the world, especially those in the country, will derive vicarious pleasure from another Indian (at least by birth) earning the top honour.

The Times of India listed India’s Nobel connections on their website, a list which includes British surgeon Ronald Ross and poet Rudyard Kipling — both born in India.

The list stretched to include all categories, as evident from above, contains only 12 names.

Whereas Ramakrishnan is the 13th Nobel prize winner from Cambridge-based MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology alone.

The WolframAlpha search engine returns an estimate of 14,172 patents filed in 2009 for U.S. for the query “U.S. patents filed”.

The comparative figure for China is 2097. For India it returns a figure of 256.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan took his PhD in physics and gets a Nobel for chemistry while investigating a biological process.

Why has no Indian working in India won a science Nobel since independence?

Is it the lack of multi-disciplinary approach in Indian institutions?

Is it our expenditure on R&D? Or the brain drain?

New Delhi is barring residents of Indian Kashmir from travelling to China on separate visas issued by the Chinese embassy.

Saifuddin Soz, senior Kashmiri leader and member of India’s ruling Congress party, has said the decision by China to issue hand-written visas on loose sheets of paper to Kashmiris was “not acceptable”.

Why is China issuing separate visas to people from Indian Kashmir?

Separatist leaders say that China’s decision to issue visas to Kashmiris on loose sheets reflects Beijing’s recognition of Kashmir as disputed territory.

Kashmir, where tens of thousands of people have been killed since an anti-India insurgency broke out in 1989, is divided between India, Pakistan and China.

India controls around 45 percent of the former princely state, Pakistan around a third and China the rest, a largely uninhabited slice of high-altitude desert.

China has given no explanation for its move, but New Delhi took up the matter with the Chinese embassy and asked Beijing to stop discriminating against Indian nationals on the basis of their “ethnicity” and “domicile”.

“How would they feel if India only offers a stamped visa to Tibetans while issuing visas on a separate paper for the applications residing in other parts of China,” an official from the Ministry of Home Affairs was quoted as saying by the Economic  Times.

Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama, who calls for greater autonomy and cultural freedom for Tibet, has lived in northern India since fleeing Tibet during a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.

China accuses the Dalai Lama of wanting independence for Tibet.

Beijing’s new visa policy for Indian Kashmir may affect only a handful of residents and businessmen of the disputed Himalayan region but diplomatic implications of the Chinese move could affect relations between Beijing and New Delhi.

China currently has little interest in stoking tensions, as it has been trying in recent years to reassure nervous Western nations that its economic rise will not be matched by military expansion. Diplomats like to talk of “peaceful development”.

Then why is China issuing visas to residents of Indian Kashmir on loose sheets of paper and not on Indian passports?

It’s actually on page 17 of the Hindustan Times. The Mail Today, which leads on liquor being allowed for sale in shopping malls, puts it on page 16. The Hindu, which also finds space for liquor sales liberalization on its front page, puts it on page 20.

What is it? News of the Indonesia quake and the Samoan tsunami. Last night, when these papers were being put to bed, we knew that hundreds (now probably thousands) of people had died.

Why is such major news in Asia relegated to back pages of Indian newspapers (there are some exceptions, of course) ?

The Indonesia quake especially was close to India – there was a brief tsunami alert for the Indian Ocean — and how Indonesia copes will be of immense interest to people in India who wonder how authorities have learnt from the last 2004 Asian tsunami. And of course there is the simple humanitarian issue – the stories of suffering and hope that we all can identify with.

My pet theory is India is such a huge country, that rather like the United States, it has a tendency to look inwards.

There is a strong current in India and the U.S. that the rest of the world does not matter too much – India itself bases its economic growth on its 1.2 billion domestic consumers rather than selling stuff to the outside world. Much political and social attention in India is focused on the immense problems within its borders.

It comes down to details, too. Take for example, India’s airports. New Delhi is one of the few capital cities I know in the world that has done a first class modernization of its domestic airport, but left its international airport trailing way behind.

Most other capitals I know, it’s the other way round. In Chile, a small country that depends on exports and the outside world to survive, the first thing they did was modernize the international airport. In Venezuela, home to socialist President Hugo Chavez, their international airport dates from the 1970s — symbolic of the oil-rich country’s statist, nationalistic stance.

But one wonders if the relegation of foreign news (aside from Pakistan), is really healthy for a country that is increasingly playing diplomatically a global role, from climate change to trade and the Commonwealth Games?

Should the media be leading the way?

A street vendor in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, sold hundreds of framed portraits of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in the last one week.

Kashmiri separatists and many residents are all praise for Gaddafi after his maiden address to the U.N. General Assembly last week in which he said Kashmir should be an “independent state.”

It was a diplomatic embarrassment for India but has Gaddafi’s U.N. speech actually won him an enthusiastic fan base in strife-weary Kashmir where Muslim militants are fighting New Delhi’s rule since 1989.

The Libyan leader told the U.N. General Assembly last week that Kashmir should be an independent state, not Indian, not Pakistani.

Last week, dozens of Kashmiris carried placards reading “Gaddafi The Lion of Desert II” referring to the 1981 Hollywood movie “Lion of the Desert”, which is about Omar Mukhtar, who led the rebellion against Italian rule in Libya and was captured and hanged in 1931.

The movie on Omar Mukhtar encouraged rebellion in Kashmir in 1985. This is for the first time in recent times a Muslim leader outside the Indian sub-continent has advocated Kashmir’s complete independence both from India and Pakistan.

The two countries claim the region in full but rule in parts.

Encouraged by the speech, separatist leaders say Gaddafi’s statement in the U.N. General Assembly should serve as an eye-opener for Indian and Pakistani leaders.

Despite two wars over Kashmir, India and Pakistan have so far failed to find a solution to the more than six-decade-old dispute over Kashmir.

New Delhi has so far largely struggled to win the hearts and minds of the people of Kashmir, where anti-India sentiment still runs deep.

Gaddafi also opposed the expansion of the U.N. Security Council by including countries like India. New Delhi, which has downplayed Gaddafi’s statement, has not yet reacted officially.

Has Gaddafi’s U.N. speech on Kashmir’s “freedom” won him foes in India and friends in Kashmir?

Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, locally known as Pandits, fled their ancestral homes in droves 20 years ago after a bloody rebellion broke out against New Delhi’s rule in India’s only Muslim-majority state.

Now encouraged by the sharp decline in rebel violence across the Himalayan region, authorities have formally launched plans to help Pandits return home.

Will Pandits, who say they “live in exile in different parts of their own country” return to their homeland in Kashmir where two decades of violence has left nothing untouched and brought misery to the scenic region, its people and its once easy-going society?

Earlier this month, the government constituted a high level committee led by Kashmir’s Revenue Minister, Raman Bhalla, which will monitor the return of displaced Hindus and effective implementation of New Delhi’s rehabilitation package which includes financial assistance of 750,000 rupees for house  construction.

The initiative is driven by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s package of 16,000 million rupees last year for the return and rehabilitation of Kashmiri Hindus living as migrants in several parts of the country, mostly in Jammu, the Hindu-dominated winter capital of the state.

Many Hindus who fled Kashmir have sold their homes or lost their kin in the violence that has also killed more than 47, 000 people including Muslim militants and civilians.

Some Pandit groups who have opposed the initiative are demanding a separate, guarded homeland within the Kashmir Valley while others complained that authorities are not meeting their security concerns.

In the largest migration since the 1947 partition of the subcontinent into mainly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan, nearly 250,000 Kashmiri Pandits left for safer places in India after a bloody insurgency broke out in 1989.

In the past, Pandits have been deterred by a series of attacks by suspected militants. At least 209 Hindus have been also killed since 1989.

Though Kashmiri separatists have made fresh appeals urging Hindus to return to the Valley, they have asked them to live side by side with Muslims rather than in “security zones”.

Bhalla says 15,000 families have agreed to return and at least 200 apartments have been contracted so far.

Will Kashmiri Pandits return to their homes in Kashmir, where still almost daily gun battles, between troops and Muslim rebels, and occasional bomb explosions take place?

(PHOTO: A Kashmiri Pandit holds a lighted earthen lamp at a shrine in Khirbhawani, 30 km east of Srinagar May 31, 2009. REUTERS/Danish Ismail)

At a recent family gathering, a cousin of mine expressed her desire to be a doctor. Not surprising, considering her parents are both in the same profession, and run a prominent hospital. It seems only natural that she will take the baton forward.

However, to get there, she will still have to go through the grind. Study for at least six years, serve in a rural posting, burn the midnight oil and gain some experience before she can fulfil her dream.

Rajendra Shekhawat has a similar story. He also wants to take up his mother’s profession and take on the baton, so to speak. The difference is that he may not necessarily have to go through the grind. His mother, Pratibha Patil, after all, is the President of India and Shekhawat has been given a ticket by the Congress party to fight the assembly elections from Amravati in northern Maharashtra, one of India’s biggest states.

“My family has been in the Congress for 40 years. My mother has worked for this party. My father has held several posts for the party”, Shekhawat was quoted as saying by the CNN-IBN news channel.

He isn’t the only one. Reports say many more leaders are gunning for tickets for their children or siblings in the forthcoming elections for the Maharashtra assembly. Poonam Mahajan, daughter of late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, is contesting elections from the Ghatkopar assembly seat.

Dynastic politics isn’t a new phenomenon in Indian politics, but it has become an increasingly wide-reaching one in recent times. Almost every political party has leaders whose sons and daughters have entered politics, most of them without much political experience.

Rahul Gandhi, of course leads the pack, but there are several more, all of them cutting across party lines. And while every party criticises “dynastic politics” in their manifesto, they turn around and practice the same credo when it comes to their own sons and daughters. Of course that isn’t to say that these sons and daughters may not do well in politics, but aren’t they getting an unfair advantage over other political hopefuls?

What do you think? Should you get a ticket just because your parents have worked for a particular party?

If Law Minister Veerappa Moily has his way, horror stories of years, even decades, spent waiting for a court verdict may soon be a thing of the past.

In an interview to a national daily this week, Moily said his ministry is planning to set up 5,000 new courts in the next three years, each working in three shifts to clear a backlog of  27.4 million cases pending in trial courts.

The Moily ministry’s roadmap for judicial reforms sees court cases resolved in just a year. At present, some cases drag on for 15 years or more.

Also in the pipeline are time limits for delivering verdicts, laptops for trial court judges and retired judges pitching in with their time.

Some say these measures are necessary in a country which suffers from what the Chief Justice of India called a “chronic shortage of judicial officers“.

K.G. Balakrishnan is in favour of appointing more judges and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called for quickly filling up High Court vacancies.

The law minister is also looking at reducing the number of cases filed on behalf of the government while others say there is a need to screen the rising number of public interest litigations.

Some even advocate plea bargaining, saying it could play a part in reducing the backlog of cases.

Reforms in the judiciary could also make India a better investment destination. Separate commercial courts or specialized chambers in existing courts could reduce the time and cost of commercial contract enforcement, the World Bank said in a report in June.

Will the Moily roadmap help revamp the Indian judicial system?