Vice-President Hamid Ansari on Monday said challenges still remained in the electoral system. The real empowerment and participative governance at the third tier of the government was still a work in progress. He expressed the hope that the electoral process at the local self-government level would benefit from coordination and sharing of experiences and resources with the EC. He was addressing the diamond jubilee celebrations of the Election Commission of India. Similarly,...

UN climate panel chairman Rajendra Pachauri today said the panel’s erroneous forecast that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 had not hurt its credibility and that he had no intention of resigning. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had earlier this week conceded that its fourth assessment report had without substantiation predicted that most of the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 because of climate change. “It was...

Senior biotechnology scientists have questioned the rationale for public consultations on genetically modified (GM) brinjal called by the environment ministry to decide the fate of what could be India’s first biotech food crop. “I think this (public consultation) is absolutely unwarranted,” said Shantu Shantaram, a scientist who was among the world’s first regulators of biotech crops in the US during the 1990s and who says he strongly favours the introduction...

Analysts have documented in some detail the constraints facing the government: the countryside is vast; the forests help protect the militants; the adivasi population in particular supports them; the hit-and-run tactics of the Maoists keep the security forces off balance; the increasing unification of the various factions makes the movement formidable and not easy to divide and conquer; its access to money and guns is growing as is its political...

Women’s groups have demanded a comprehensive legislation to address rape and sexual assault. A delegation that met Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily earlier this week, said there was a need to incorporate various substantive and procedural sections in the indian Penal Code, Criminal Procedure Code and the indian Evidence Act to deal with child sexual assault and sexual assault against women. Archaic definition In a memorandum to the Minister, the...