India, like other Asian countries, has focused its climate change adaptation strategies on rural and urban areas while neglecting the urban fringes, say experts. Peri-urban areas are characterised by haphazard, accelerated expansion and are farthest from basic urban services and infrastructure, according to United Nations-Habitat’s ‘The State of Asian Cities 2010-11’. By 2020, of the projected 4.2 billion urban population of the world, 2.2 billion will be living in Asia, many...

The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) has warned against the increasing leasing and buying of millions of hectares of farmlands in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America for food and fuel production. This land is being leased to private investors and sovereign wealth funds with no explicit legal agreement on how water will be used on these farmlands. The World Bank has estimated that over 56 million hectares of land in Africa...

India’s Bt cotton dream is going terribly wrong. For the first time, farmer suicides, including those in 2011-12, have been linked to the declining performance of the much hyped genetically modified (GM) variety adopted by 90% of the country’s cotton-growers since being allowed a decade ago. Policymakers have hailed Bt cotton as a success story but a January 9 internal advisory, a copy of which is with HT, sent out to...

-The Hindu Food subsidies for poorest will help them cope: ADB A hike in the cost of food staples like rice and wheat could push tens of millions more people into extreme poverty in the South Asian region including India, says an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report. The Manila-based lending agency, in its report “Food Price Escalation in South Asia – A Serious and Growing Concern” released on Monday, however, said that food...

That Bihar under Nitish Kumar grew at over 10% between 2004-05 and 2009-10 is now well-known. But data released on Monday shows that in the same period, the number of poor in the state actually grew.  During this five-year period, Bihar added 50 lakh people to the number of its poor, by far the largest number of any Indian state in this period. A look at Planning Commission numbers for 2009-10...