A lot has been said and written about the visit of Barack Obama, the President of USA to India. The corporate media was in the usual over-enthusiastic drive to bring to its readers and viewers all minute details about his visit from where he stayed and what he ate to how many warships, planes and cars accompanied him and how a whopping $200 million was spent per day for the...

Even as the Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment — dubbed “the Indian Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)” — released its first report on the impact of climate change in four regions of the country, it admitted that significant research gaps and lack of extensive databases were hampering Indian climate science. Long-term localised data was not available on vegetation and forest cover, socio-economic trends, farm inputs, pests and crop diseases,...

The opening and closing ceremonies received wide acclaim but left many citizens like me a bit terrified and confused. Now that the terms of inquiry into the conduct of the Commonwealth Games have been extended, let us hope that the process of probe will be more open than was decision-making for the CWG. Let us also hope that the review will cover the opening and closing ceremonies as well, both in...

Despite its seminal success in beginning a process of addressing issues of poverty, starvation and empowering the poor, the MGNREGA needed a general election to breathe life into it. However, the disproportionate influence of the middle class on social sector policy has led to the same set of pre-election prejudices resurfacing. "What use is the MGNREGA to the economy at large?" asks the businessman, one eye fixed apprehensively on the share...

The agreement that was recently concluded at the 10th Conference of the Parties (COP-10) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at Nagoya in Japan will go down in history as the second most important global initiative, after the CBD itself, in protecting the Earth’s fast-depleting biodiversity. This is vital for sustaining life on the planet. The ball was set rolling way back in 1992 with the adoption of the...