Swaths of the world inhabit a modern dark age, with lack of electricity and modern cooking facilities condemning billions to deep poverty, the top UN energy body said Tuesday. According to the International Energy Agency, more than 20 percent of the global population, or 1.4 billion people, lack access to electricity, while about 40 percent rely on the likes of wood stoves for cooking. "This is shameful and unacceptable," the IEA said...

Next month, the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, one of the most powerful laws enacted in independent India, completes half a decade in the cause of transparent and accountable administration. It enables, on demand, access to information the State and Central governments have in their possession. It empowers Indian citizens to ask for and get specific information, subject to certain norms, from a Public Authority, “thus making its functionaries...

Activist and academic Raj Patel’s profile proudly notes that he has worked for the World Bank and the WTO, and protested against them both around the world. A visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Centre for African Studies, Patel’s latest offering to the literary world—The Value of Nothing—is a New York Times bestseller. In an interview with Ashish Kumar Sen, Patel says beating the drum of India...

The Group of Ministers, headed by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, on Friday cleared the draft mining bill, which makes it mandatory for miners to share 26 per cent of their profits with the people affected by their projects. “It is largely approved. One more sitting of the GoM remains, and after which it will go to the Cabinet. Whatever we have suggested has by and large been approved,” Union Minister for...

Unfortunate though it may seem, many Indians only identify with Ladakh because of the popularity of Three Idiots and the progressive school there which Aamir Khan has now gone to assist. We tend to forget that it is part of Jammu and Kashmir because the unrest in the valley obscures everything else. Ladakh is often described as a cold desert, with scanty rainfall, which is why Leh and its environs were...