The journey to have a common set of accounting standards started long before to give it a professional shape and essence. And accountants all over the world feel the necessity to shorten the gap among different streams of accounting practices through harmonization. Still, we have a couple of strong variants of accounting practices (say, for example, US GAAP, UK GAAP, IAS etc.) over the world existed and practiced simultaneously. These variants are working as threats towards harmonization of accounting practices. However, the profession has also witnessed some improvements in recent years in the process of global convergence putting some ray of hope. International and even local standard setting bodies have come up with projects of harmonization and in most of the cases became successful.The day is not far away when we will observe that accounting world is controlled and guided by a single set of standards giving it a status of legal discipline in true sense. The paper focuses on this harmonization issue, its current status, challenges with special reference to Indian perspective.

Corporate environmental reporting becomes a crucial issue in today's corporate reporting. The present status and future focus gives every indication that it is going to capture a permanent position in the bundle of general-purpose financial statement. Because, the corporate reporting is for the stakeholders and every stakeholders show a keen interest on such disclosure. Protecting the environment is the social responsibility and commitment of corporations towards the society. It is believed that corporation is responsible for the environmental crisis and so they should pay for this (cost-benefit trade off). However, reporting is mostly guided by standards, guidelines etc. And, we do not have any standards designed for such disclosure. So, such reporting is still voluntary that has no specific format and style. Voluntary disclosure often leads to non-disclosure and mandatory disclosure leads to minimal disclosure. Thus, environmental disclosure should have both type of orientation, as it is a question of life and sustainability. The paper gives a conceptual discussion on corporate environmental reporting and guidelines. It also gives a literature review of current reporting practices to highlights the developments till date. And, this concludes that the level, extent and style of disclosure are not satisfactory at all in any respect. The professionals and respective regulatory authorities should come forward with stricter standards and guidelines to this issue that is the demand of time.

A field study of the nest-building behaviour in the breeding season of the Asian Open-Billed Stork, Anastomus oscitans, was conducted in the Kulik Bird Sanctuary, Raiganj, Uttar Dinajpur, West Bengal, India. Observations were made throughout one complete breeding season (2007)(2008) in the sanctuary. The open-billed stork comes in the last week of June at the Kulik bird sanctuary, stays there for 5 to 6 months and leaves the place in the month of December of every year. From the present observations it was noticed that about 58920 storks came to Kulik during 2008. Various types of behaviour were observed during this particular period. Coming to the Kulik, pairing of the individual storks start and mating display was observed within a day or two. Birds of a pair supplied the nest building materials to form the nest. To give a definite shape to the nest it took about 12-15 days before egg laying. The nesting territory consisted of a semicircle, some times circular and approximately with 30.21 ± 0.12 cm radius. The depth of the nest was about 6.9 ± 0.02 cm. The nest building materials consisted of fragments of old branches of trees, some soft green leaves and grasses. These branches helped in strengthening and the leaves and grasses helped in softening of the nest. During the incubation period both sexes were involved to incubate the eggs. Nest attendance of the breeding birds was continuous during the first 2-months period. From regular observation it was noticed that either of the pair took additional care by spreading their wings during the time of heavy sunshine or heavy rain. The main behavioral patterns examined were aerial displays, mating pattern, nest building, egg laying and incubation pattern, nest defense and nest protection. Diversity of nesting behavior in openbilled stork was pointed out and discussed.

Accounting has no meaning without standards due to professionalism. The use and application of standards in accounting gets so importance that it will not go wrong if it is termed as a legal discipline. By the time, the world has given accounting the certification of international discipline. So, it is apt to say that as an international discipline, accounting should have a single set of standards for all for harmonizing the practice in a global scenario. But the reality is that we still have various streams of accounting standards like US GAAP, UK GAAP, IAS, and so on. These different streams are the threat for accounting against its harmonization of practices. Though the world has witnessed a lot of initiatives taken to reduce the streams into one in recent years, still we cannot ensure the final sophistication in this regard. The paper focuses on the convergence issue, its current status, challenges with special reference to Indian perspective.

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