-The Hindu India says it is ready for a regime of stocktaking of future carbon emissions. In a clear signal that active diplomacy is at work to forge an agreement in Paris based on voluntary pledges, one that is subject to transparent monitoring, India said on Friday that it was ready for a regime of stocktaking of future carbon emissions. The U.S., on its part, said it had “nothing but respect” for...

-Hindustan Times School textbooks in recent decades have frequently become battlegrounds for ideological contestation in India. Most textbook wars are to advance majoritarian perspectives on history and culture. However, a recent very different textbook skirmish broke out about the public and private sectors in healthcare. The story of this ideological clash is bemusing and instructive, illuminating competing perspectives on the nature of education, healthcare and markets in new India. This clash surfaced...

-Economic and Political Weekly While insufficient sanitation facilities often get represented in statistics and are reported in the literature on urban infrastructure planning and contested urban spaces, what is often left out is the everyday practice and experience of going to dysfunctional toilets, particularly by women. By analysing the practices and problems associated with toilet use from a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to situate the issue in the everyday lives...

-The Hindu A recent sting video shows the men acquitted in the Laxmanpur Bathe case boasting about the same massacre. Will the passing of the Prevention of Atrocities (Amendment) Bill finally change the way justice is delivered to Dalits? On the night of December 1, 1997, in Laxmanpur Bathe, a village in Bihar’s Arwal district 90 km from Patna, 58 Dalits were slaughtered by a gang of dominant caste men that went...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Indian weaver is dismissed in high places as an embarrassing anachronism, despite demand for his or her skills and products. In the new millennium, globalisation and a mindless acquiescence to imported notions of a good life threaten to take over, even as the West looks East for better concepts of sustainable living. Analysing today's crisis in the handloom sector, plagued by low-cost imitations from power looms,...