Says India will be one of the biggest beneficiaries ‘I am trying to bridge gap between academic work and policy making' ‘Need for honest attempt for interflow of ideas from think tanks and use them in policy making' Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Monday said that India cannot accept any international agreement without equity and insisted on equitable access to global atmospheric space. “This is a matter of survival,” he told a press...

The rapid growth of emerging economies has led to a shift in economic power: forecasts based on analysis by late economist Angus Maddison suggest that the aggregate economic weight of developing and emerging economies is about to surpass that of the countries that currently make up the advanced world. According to Perspectives on Global Development: Shifting Wealth, a new publication from the OECD Development Centre, the economic and financial crisis is...

The number of poor people in India is expected to halve by 2015, according to the 2010 Millennium Development Goals report released on Wednesday. The poverty rate in the country is slated to decline from 51% of the population in 1990 to 24% over the next five years. That translates into around 188 million more people meeting a minimum subsistence standard of $1.25 a day—the benchmark for the report's findings....

Unfettered coal mining is causing unchecked underground fires that threaten human habitation and the environment, writes geologist Dr Nitish Priyadarshi. The haunting inscription that marks the gates of hell in Dante's Inferno could well be true for Jharkhand. For, the underground fires that have been raging in the coalfields of this state over several years are now beginning to engulf its thickly inhabited areas as well. An underground mine fire that has...

Even before the food and financial crises hit the world, prevalence of hunger in South Asia was increasing instead of decreasing, taking the region further away from the goal of reducing hunger by half by 2015, according to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals report, 2010. The report says in 2005-2007, the proportion of undernourished people in South Asia had swelled to levels last seen in 1990. The prevalence of...