Taxes on international flights, shipping and financial transactions, as well as a global carbon price of $20 to $25 may be key to annually mobilising $100 billion in climate funding by 2020, according to the United Nations high-level advisory group on climate change financing, which submitted its report in New York on Friday. At the U.N. climate summit held in Copenhagen last year, developed countries committed to a goal of jointly...

Even as railway minister Mamata Banerjee opposes government’s role in acquiring land for private companies , the contentious land acquisition (amendment) bill figures in the list of business for the winter session of Parliament beginning next week. The bill has been hanging fire in the wake of opposition from the Trinamool Congress leader, who recently skipped a meeting convened by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to evolve a consensus within the ruling...

To maintain projects to clean the river and restore its environmental health Centre to consider Uttarakhand's demand for free power in compensation for scrapped projects Conservation Action Plan approved for Gangetic dolphin, the national aquatic animal States through which the Ganga flows will soon be given additional funding to operate and maintain projects to clean the river and restore its environmental health. However, States lobbied for more aid and free power to those...

The centre has asked the states to strengthen their public distribution systems (PDS) to minimise the impact of high inflation on the poor, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said here Monday. 'The central government has requested the states to strengthen their public distribution systems to ensure that the vulnerable groups of the society are not adversely affected by the current level of inflation,' Mukherjee said at the second annual conference of finance...

The case of the Food Security Bill gets curiouser and curiouser.  What started off as a fight between universalization and targeting has ended (or so it would seem) in a complete victory in the National Advisory Council, Government of India (NAC) for targeting through universalization (if such a thing was possible), with the honourable exception of Prof Jean Dreze, who has to be commended for his ‘note of disagreement’. On...