The rural population is at present estimated at 85 crores. Ten per cent of the households are completely landless. Another 52 per cent have holdings of less than 0.2 hectare. The per capita agricultural land in the rural areas has come down to 0.12 hectare. According to the National Sample Survey, the annual income of an agricultural household from farming is less than Rs 12,000 and from all sources it...

A seminar titled Food Security and Sustainability in India, organized at Amritsar between 7 and 8 November by the GAD Institute of Development Studies, a NGO, at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, brought together government officials, scientists, academicians and NGOs so as to generate discussions and debates surrounding climate change and global warming and their impact on agriculture. The Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change is going to take place between...

If there is one sector that is visibly the intersection of backroom politics, crony capitalism and serious threats to India’s internal security, it is mining. The business of resource extraction has always had its own peculiar economic logic: modern, yet dependent on the land; high-tech, yet somehow, indefinably, with feudal overtones. These anomalies have traditionally been recognised by economists, who categorise mining as the only “industrial” component of the primary,...

Member-states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) on Tuesday agreed to make a separate statement as an entity at the Copenhagen meet on climate change in December. This was decided at the Delhi Statement on Cooperation in Environment that was adopted at the end of the SAARC Ministerial meeting here. Environment Ministers of seven SAARC countries parties participated in the meet while Pakistan was represented by its...

Energy security is a major objective of all countries. Some are proactive and aggressive in this pursuit, like China; others like India are slow and procrastinate on major decisions and allow hope to overtake realistic assessments. This makes energy security in the foreseeable future an uncertain goal for India. Any discussion of energy security must keep in mind the Indian realities. Although in overall terms of commercial energy use to...