-The Hindu The All India Democratic Women's Association has expressed unhappiness over the Marriage Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2010 and the amendments made to it, as reintroduced in the Rajya Sabha on Monday, that make irretrievable breakdown of marriage a ground for divorce, giving women the right to marital assets, including the marital home. However, there is no provision for strengthening maintenance laws. In its letter, the AIDWA has appealed to Rajya Sabha...

The National Green Tribunal's decision to suspend the environmental clearance given to Posco vindicates the project's critics. ON March 30, the Principal Bench of the newly formed National Green Tribunal (NGT) delivered a momentous decision suspending the environmental clearance (EC) given to the South Korean transnational corporation, Posco, to set up an integrated steel plant at Paradip in Odisha's Jagatsinghpur district. The former Union Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam...

Much has been written about divorce being on the rise in India, sometimes accompanied by hand-wringing about the egos and inflexibility of younger couples, who seem less willing than their parents to stay in marriages they are not happy with. National statistics don’t exist on divorce in India, but some local records do show a rise. Still, some experts say the divorce rate in India continues to be artificially low, because...

The disaster in Japan revealed many risks that were earlier unknown; it is important to assess the risks in India in a transparent manner and explain which are worth taking. The nuclear plant accident at Fukushima, Japan, in March 2011 exemplifies the prescient remark of nuclear reactor pioneer, the late Alvin Weinberg, that “a nuclear accident somewhere is a nuclear accident everywhere.” After Fukushima, many countries initiated a reconsideration of the...

The irrationality and waste in energy subsidies in India has been a perennial theme in analysis of the Indian economy and in reform prescriptions. Progress has, however, turned out to be elusive in the face of ground realities and feasible politics.  The power ministry, after struggling for over a decade through repeated exhortations, had the satisfaction of getting a resolution in a Chief Ministers Conference in 2001 that free supply of...