Enjoying the sun-rise and sun-shine in my bed room with a wide glass window. 

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How robust is our pesticide policy? A case of waiting period or post-harvest interval for safe consumption of produce

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Top: Saurashtra farmer who was keen to offer us a gift of maize, but for spray a day before; Bottom: Ready to spray with mixture on cotton.   As early as 1985, India recognised importance of integrated pest management to achieving optimal crop protection in its agricultural policy. This policy also envisaged reduction in the use of synthetic pesticides and increase in eco-friendly safe tactics in the agroecosystem. Safety to all is pivotal of crop protection policy. However, synthetic pesticides remained the bulwark of integrated pest management in agriculture. In fact, consumption of synthetic pesticides has increased over the past two decades from about 45,000 tons to about 60,000 tons. And hence, it has become necessary that we use pesticides judiciously so that farmers save their farm produce from the ravages of pests and at the same time, consumers get foodgrains and other farm produce that are safe to eat. Some years back, I was reading the data on major uses of pesticides, e
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Probit Analysis of bioassays: Sure, you are seriously talking about it

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    After reviewing a manuscript, I thought of talking to my friend who works in the prestigious Government institution to know as to how he estimates various parameters of toxicity like LC50, fiducial limits [FL] or Confidence intervals [CI], intercept. And this reminded me of my days as a M.Sc. student when I would do these calculations using a Facit® manual calculator on a tabulated sheet that our insect toxicology teacher, Dr. B.S. Atri would provide us. It was tedious work involving filling of columns like concentrations, log concentrations, % mortality, their transformation into probits, weighting coefficients, empirical probits, expected probits, working probits and other parameters meticulously up to three decimal points until we came to an equation, y=a+bx, where y is 5.0, a, an intercept and b, a slope and x (log LC50) is what we will calculate. For 95% FL, we used two equations, m1=m-1.96 √ V and m2=m+.6 √ V where m1, m2, lower and upper FLs of LC50, √ square root of varian
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Pheromone-based Crop Protection: Mating Disruption technology needs many researchable inputs to succeed sustainably

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Moths of the pink bollworm in the pheromone trap Farmers' gathering: pheromone MD formulation, PB knot tied on stem of cotton larva of the pink bollworm feeding inside the raw cotton boll It was in mid-1980s and early 1990s that the American bollworm caused havoc to cotton production in the country leading some farmers to commit suicides in the erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and others, as they had taken loans in expectation of bumper yields. Farmers did not believe that this bollworm can be a key pest, reducing their cotton production significantly. The pest insect had developed resistance to most of insecticides used in cotton and thrived well. Insecticide-based control of pests was a big failure, affecting environment and health of all stakeholders. Everyone scrambled for solution. Botanicals like neem, microbials like nucleopolyhedrosis virus, and parasites like Trichogramma chilonis were reported to be alternate to insecticides. The need-based use of insect
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