With an eye to mainstreaming sustainability, rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has reached out to the United Nations Development Programme to suggest ways for 'greening' rural development schemes and programmes. "We are spending Rs 99,000 crore this year on rural development programmes and it would be a shame if we don't mainstream green objectives in these programmes. Rural development programmes offer a huge opportunity to deal with green concerns and challenges...

The government has taken exception to the `biases' in the United NationsDevelopment Programme's (UNDP) Asia Pacific Human Development report, titled, One Planet, which was released on Thursday. UNDP, required to play a neutral role in international governance, has recommended that India and other countries in the Asia Pacific region take greater responsibility to reduce emissions and warned that 'inclusive growth' would increase emissions, a trade-off that India cannot afford. Pointing...

Even as it recognizes that developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region like India must to grow to eke millions of its people out of poverty, a United Nations' report has made it clear that given the realities of climate change "growing first and cleaning up later" is no longer an option for these developing countries. The report, "One Planet to Share" by the United Nations Development Programme, marks a subtle...

Ramaswamy R. Iyer, former Secretary, Union Ministry of Water Resources, has been a consistent critic of the idea of interlinking rivers (ILR). In this interview, he shares his concerns about the Supreme Court's judgment directing the government to implement the project, and explains why it is deeply flawed. Excerpts In your article in “The Hindu”, you have claimed that the government's stand on the project is ambiguous. The amicus curiae has,...

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...