-PTI Reflecting the concerns of India, the Rio+20 summit has said that developing countries needed additional resources for sustainable development and that unwarranted conditionalities on Official Development Assistance (ODA) and finance should be avoided. “We reaffirm that developing countries need additional resources for sustainable development,” said the 55-page declaration adopted at the end of the Rio+20 summit officially called “United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development”. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his address at...

-The Hindu Reservation on the basis of religion has always raised serious constitutional concerns and a recent ruling of the Andhra Pradesh High Court (which the Supreme Court refused to stay) declaring the sub-quota for minorities unconstitutional only illustrates this constitutional tension. This is not the first time that the Andhra Pradesh High Court has declared reservation for religious minorities constitutionally invalid. In 2005, a five-judge-bench of the Andhra Pradesh High Court...

-The Hindu Commodification, commercialisation and financialisation of nature will produce a greedy, not green, economy Over 100 world leaders will meet in Rio de Janeiro this week for the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, popularly referred to as Rio+20 Global Earth Summit. It is being held amidst “‘a world running low on drinking water and productive land’ and set against the backdrop of accelerating global warming, climate change, chemical contamination of air, land...

A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...

-DNA Slamming private educational institutes that often use RTI for accessing the question papers of various examinations and making it public for their commercial gains, the Delhi high court said sundry information, unrelated to transparency and accountability, should not be allowed to be misused or abused. A division bench of acting chief justice A K Sikri and justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw said this while setting aside the order of the Central Information...