Weather events such as extreme temperatures and drought caused global agricultural losses of 11.4 billion dollars in 2011, while 12 million hectares of farmland are lost to land degradation every year, and unsustainable agricultural practices contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases. These and other data provided by a report released Wednesday in London by leading scientists from 13 countries raise the question of how to curb the environmental crisis, guarantee...

-The Business Standard   Learning from the jatropha mistake The tropical shrub jatropha curcas, touted a decade ago as a commercially feasible source of biofuel to alleviate the global energy crisis, seems to have let its proponents down quite comprehensively. Millions of hectares of land in the arid areas of India and in many other Asian and African countries were turned into jatropha plantations in the expectation that the oil derived from its...

-The Economic Times In a first for the state, newly elected Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has publicly declared his assets worth 4.83 crore, setting the tone for his cabinet colleagues to come out and declare their net worth. Agency reports said that in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections when Akhilesh Yadav filed his nomination papers for Kannauj parliamentary seat, he had declared movable and immovable assets of more than 5.52...

Consumption-based measures don’t accurately estimate poverty Since the publication of poverty estimates purportedly based on the Tendulkar methodology and the 2009-10 consumption survey of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), many in Parliament and outside, from different political parties, have questioned its conclusions. Concomitantly, media reactions have speculated on poverty’s relationship with fertility, growth, specific schemes, et al. But, India’s poverty, like itself, refuses to classify itself in simple boxes. Beyond the...

The purpose of this piece is not to defend the Planning Commission on poverty figures but to indicate that the methodologies have evolved over time after considerable research and they are useful for policy purposes if not for linking with entitlement programmes (some of us have written earlier that the poor and vulnerable are more numerous than the commission's poverty figures and these should be delinked from entitlement programmes).  The commission...