The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...

A new report suggests that 175 million children will be affected every year by frequent natural disasters caused due to climate change. Painting a grim future, a report by child rights NGO Save the Children said climate change was the biggest global health threat to children that could increase risk of deaths due to diarrhoea, malnutrition, malaria and other diseases because of reduced community access to clean water, nutritious food...

CITIES MAKE one simple promise to newcomers: Sacrifice yourself to me and your children shall prosper. This promise drew Ahmed Raza, a small-time wrestler from an Uttar Pradesh village and millions like him to the capital of newly-independent India. Raza kept his part of the bargain, yet half a century later, his daughter was pushed out of the city her father helped build, the only home she has known. “I...

Indian policymakers are debating doing away with the mandatory rating of financial instruments in the long-term, among a set of measures aimed at strengthening the regulatory and disclosures regime for credit ratings. The expert group, set up by the High Level Coordination Committee on Financial Markets (HLCCFM), has made specific recommendations on improving and disclosing the way credit rating agencies rate financial instruments, and has sought debate on the very...

India must resist developed country pressure to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, goes the cry. Such a position helps only the rich, in a tearing hurry to grow richer, the environment be damned. It is in the interest of India’s poor for the country to adopt a stringent policy regime to control emissions domestically and thus contribute to a binding deal to cut emissions globally. Climate change has been identified...