Like stags fighting, the first days of each annual UN climate summit start with delegations circling each other politically, looking for weaknesses, gauging strengths. The summit that began this week in Durban, South Africa, has been no different - and though it might seem that little has been accomplished so far, a number of blocs have at least made their positions clearer than ever before. And that's vital if effective negotiations are...

Cutting across party lines, several members of Parliament backed a universal public distribution system to ensure food security for all citizens “as a right” and vowed to oppose the ‘targeted' food security bill in Parliament. Among the participants at a Jan Manch organised by the Right to Food Campaign were G. Vivekananda, K. Keshava Rao and Mani Shankar Aiyer (Congress), Prakash Javadekar (BJP), Brinda Karat and P. Rajeev (CPI-M), D. Raja...

-The Times of India If you have a kutcha house or have a tarpaulin to cover youself, the socio-caste survey will not consider you homeless. If a farmer has a hand-pump provided by the government or a kisan patra to take loans against that, the same BPL scheme could now disqualify him from a BPL card.  If a widow has a 16 year-old son, she may end up losing the BPL status...

-The Hindu   The People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) on Sunday slammed the report of the Government-appointed expert committee on Kudankulam as being extremely flawed, premised on obsolete demographic data and opaque on the risks from sub-volcanic activity near the site or health impact on the local population. The PMANE also released a letter to Chief Minister Jayalalithaa seeking her intervention in scrapping the project. In the letter to the Chief Minister–copies of...

Five days after writing to Sena working president Uddhav Thackeray, RTI activists denounced the private member bill introduced by a Sena MP to make amendments to the RTI Act. They also pledged to initiate a mass campaign against any amendment that would dilute the RTI Act at a public meeting. On Monday, activists wrote to Sena president and e-mailed his son Aditya, asking both to ensure that their party MP, Bhausaheb Wakchaure,...