The convulsions that have gripped the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) — India’s flagship city development programme — with only three years to go for the termination of its assigned lifespan of seven years, is symptomatic of the country’s predilection to put politics above all other issues, including the vital ones. The Mission, aimed at pulling India’s 63 cities out of their dilapidation, which is somewhat reminiscent of...
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Copenhagen: seize the chance
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound Emergency. Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years...
More »The Ground Beneath Our Feet by Tripti Lahiri
CITIES MAKE one simple promise to newcomers: Sacrifice yourself to me and your children shall prosper. This promise drew Ahmed Raza, a small-time wrestler from an Uttar Pradesh village and millions like him to the capital of newly-independent India. Raza kept his part of the bargain, yet half a century later, his daughter was pushed out of the city her father helped build, the only home she has known. “I...
More »Singur echo in land blow to Ambani
Allahabad High Court today partly quashed the acquisition of 2,500 acres for Anil Ambani’s jinxed Dadri power project, rekindling memories of the Singur dispute. A high court division bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and Sudhir Agarwal quashed the land purchase by the Uttar Pradesh government in 2004 under Emergency provisions of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. The court noted that the state government had failed to record the objections...
More »Bhopal tragedy scientist stricken by GS Mudur
From the bed of an intensive care unit, Samavedam Sriramachari today recalled his two decades of research that helped demystify the poison gas which caused the worst chemical disaster in human history. The Indian pathologist, who helped the world fathom how the methyl isocyanate gas that leaked from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal 25 years ago killed and harmed thousands of people, is now himself fighting a lung disease probably...
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