Without urgent progress which will stimulate funding for renewables, nations could be locked into high-carbon energy and transport technologies for decades, inflating another unsustainable economic bubble, say experts. Achim Steiner, the head of the U.N. environment programme, said: “Far more worrying [than formally ratifying a treaty] is that every month we delay we send a ambiguous signal into the world economy, the markets, investors and R&D.” The markets had not...

Greenpeace today released a report – “Still Waiting” – which reveals that despite growth in electricity generation – and increasing carbon emissions – the rural poor continue to be deprived of electricity. The report challenges the government’s energy model and recommends a decentralised energy mix as a solution to overcome social injustice and mitigate climate change. The report compares the electricity supply scenarios among rural and urban areas in five...

Only a process of reverse migration based on the Gandhian model can save India’s cities, and also rural India.  A report prepared by the United Nations Development Programme reveals that in India’s big cities more than 40 per cent of the people live in slums. Some of them have reasonable levels of income, but cannot afford other housing. For many reasons including the population load, slums are unhygienic. It is...

The three-day World Summit on Food Security (WSFS) that opened in Rome, Italy on 16 November, 2009 has ended with serious differences among participants. Among those expressing dissatisfaction with the final declaration was no less a person than Jacques Diouf, the head of UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Diouf criticised the declaration for not including exact targets to reduce hunger. There is no mention of a deadline for the...

Ever since Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama, which castigated India as a “soft state”, western observers, as well as many members of the Nehruvian wing of Macaulay’s children, have failed to understand the anarchical society which has existed in India for millennia. A recent review (Journal of Economic Literature, September 2009) by Lant Pritchett (a former World Bank official in Delhi) of Financial Times’ former India correspondent Edward Luce’s book In...