Although a normal monsoon has been forecast for South Asia this year, and rains have begun normally in many parts of the region, people are still anxious about the rainy season that lasts for four months. Their anxiety has to do with the uncertainties surrounding the timing of the monsoon in recent years. While the debate continues over the role of climate change, scientists have also been looking at the possible role...

Governments are censoring digital content on the ground that it infringes intellectual ­property rights or offends people. Can they be stopped? It’s a bit of Iraq and Afghanistan out there on the Internet. Just like the invasion of Iraq was lies, deceit and regime change as George W Bush chased illusory weapons of mass destruction in that hapless country, on the Internet, too, there is an element of fabrication and duplicity...

Rather than shutting its doors on ‘civil society’, the government should be thanking its stars that the latter wants to make law, not war. Distributing tee-shirts with this slogan would be a better use of the government’s ‘hearts and minds’ funds than the integrated action plan to counter Naxals, or the army’s tourism trips to Pune for Kashmiri schoolgirls. The UPA regime has been unprecedented for the spate of legislation that...

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...

In early 1993 the late Mahbub ul Haq, Pakistan’s finance minister in the first Benazir Bhutto government and by then the famous architect of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP’s) Human Development Report, called me and asked me to defend the economic record of democracies in the developing world at a UNDP conference. “Many in Asia argue,” he said to me, “that non-democratic countries have done better both in recording higher...