The draft agreement being discussed ahead of December’s crucial Copenhagen summit is long, confusing and contradictory.  It is a blueprint to save the world. And yet it is long, confusing and contradictory. Negotiators have released a draft version of a new global agreement on climate change, which is widely billed as the last chance to save the planet from the ravages of global warming. Running to some 200 pages, the...

As we approach the global summit on climate change in December 2009 in Copenhagen, critical concerns are likely to emerge. Both the United Nations conference last week and the subsequent G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh left several issues somewhat ambiguous. While the United States spoke of reduction in its emissions, these remain insignificant. At the G-20 meet, leaders stated that they would "intensify efforts to reach an agreement at Copenhagen and...

Farmers advised to revert to traditional practices in farming to make it sustainable in future ANANTAPUR: Experts at a workshop on climate change and sustainable agriculture have opined that the Green Revolution has done more harm than good to the agriculture sector in the country from a long term perspective. They suggested the farmers to return to traditional practices in farming in order to make the vocation sustainable in future....

Here’s a hypothetical, though not altogether unfamiliar, scenario that academic and writer Sunil Khilnani invoked in a lecture at the British Museum to warn against what he called the “paradox of India’s new prosperity.” He asked his audience to imagine two traffic lanes, both at a standstill. After a while traffic in one of the lanes starts moving raising hopes of those stuck in the next lane that they, too,...

A commission set up to look into alternative ways of measuring economic and social progress has added to the existing debate but not made any real advances.  FOR some time now it has been clear that standard measurements of growth and development are inadequate and possibly even misleading. The problem of looking at only the aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) has been widely noted: its blindness to distributional issues and...