At the Cancun climate change conference in December 2010, Jairam Ramesh, Union minister for environment and forests, raised the white flag of surrender when, departing from the prepared text, he declared, “all countries, we believe, must take on binding commitments under appropriate legal forms”. The minister thus signalled that India will give in to pressures from developed countries to convert its voluntary, nationally-determined mitigation actions into internationally-binding commitments in an...

The Prime Minister’s Expert Committee on the proposed National Food Security Bill has differed with the National Advisory Council not only on its recommendation for subsidised foodgrains entitlement for the non-poor population, but has also recommended that the identification of the poor beneficiaries for the proposed benefit be done by State governments and not by central agencies as suggested by Sonia Gandhi. The panel, headed by C. Rangarajan, Chairman of the...

The trial court judgment holding Binayak Sen guilty of sedition has led to widespread outrage. IN India's legal history, no trial court judgment in a criminal case has perhaps caused as much international outrage as the December 24, 2010, judgment of the Second Additional District and Sessions Judge of Raipur, B.P. Verma, did. In his 92-page judgment, Judge Verma convicted Dr Binayak Sen, the well-known human rights activist and medical...

So why is the UPA hell-bent on killing its unique success story: the NREGA? Here's the inside narrative of the conspiracy. It took 47 days of a protest sit-in at Jaipur to make the state budge(1). It's notable that the objective of this protracted protest was not to coerce the Rajasthan government for an extra share of the state's resources, but to hold the government accountable to the Constitution and its...

Though the number of farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra registered a fall of 930 in 2009, the state with 2,872 suicides continued to be the worst in the country, 10th year in a row, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data. The data released in December 2010 confirms a rising trend, with at least 17,368 farmers killing themselves in India in 2009, up by 1,172 from 2008. At least 1,27,151...