The latest National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report, 'Migration in India', has found Gujarat to have the highest rate of urbanisation among all other states in the country. Based on a survey carried out by NSSO across India in 2007 and 2008, the report significantly suggests that fast pace of urbanisation in Gujarat is mainly due to intra-state migration with large sections of rural people migrating to urban areas within...

An area of cultivated land the size of Italy is lost each year to environmental degradation, industrialization and Urbanization, a UN expert said Thursday. Up to 30 million hectares (75 million acres) of land is lost to the new pressures and Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said 500 million small farmers suffer from hunger partly because "their right to land is under attack." "As rural populations...

A new round of UN climate talks opened in north China's Tianjin Municipality on Monday, which is expected to pave the way for the year-end Cancun summit in Mexico. About 3,000 delegates from party and observer countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol are attending the meeting on Oct. 4-9. They are expected to discuss the negotiating text reached at the Bonn talks in...

The rapid increase in urbanisation and allied infrastructure development activities are causing a shrinking of agricultural land in the Kashmir Valley. Farmers fear that this growing trend of private builders to purchase farmland for building residential colonies would lead to a devastating food crisis in that Kashmir Valley in the coming years. Though the law prevents the use of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes, the allotment of the land for construction comes...

In an upstairs classroom at a residential school in Mal, near Lucknow, the girls are revising for their exams. As the light starts to fade at the glassless windows, each girl takes a brightly coloured plastic lamp and carries it to her space on the floor. There is no electricity, but the lamps are solar powered. They have been donated jointly by Swedish company Ikea and the United Nations Children’s...