-The Christian Sciences Monitor Wealthy Western nations are financially exhausted and unwilling to commit to help fund greener development for poorer nations. Will this week's conference in Rio find any solutions? So what happens if you hold a UN conference on sustainable development, and world leaders make speeches, and sign treaties, and then nothing happens? This, of course, would be ABSUrd. The problem, says Bill Easterly, a development expert at New York University,...

The Yojana Bhavan toilets are causing a stink of a different kind. The Planning Commission, which estimated a poverty line figure of Rs 28 per day per person, lavished Rs 35 lakh on refurbishing two toilets in its headquarters. For good measure, the commission has admitted in an RTI response, it has spent Rs 5.19 lakh in installing an access control system in the toilets. The facility, installed while the toilets...

Row over cartoon demeans the Dalit movement in general and Ambedkar in particular The intellectual-rational capacity of the current brand of Congress leadership has always been in doubt. In the latest episode of fast-track community appeasement by banning a controversial Nehru-Ambedkar cartoon in an NCERT textbook, the ruling elites of our country hit a new low in their political opportunism. Kapil Sibal is, in general, not a popular figure among Dalits,...

-The Indian Express Where are the tall leaders who could put an end to this experiment in censorship? The UPA government may have only been true to character when it keeled over at the first hint of political uproar against cartoons in NCERT textbooks. Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal hurried to withdraw the book with the newly controversial Ambedkar cartoon, without a minimal attempt at debate, and Pranab Mukherjee said that books...

-The Hindu “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul”, B.R. Ambedkar said in a famous speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, just before putting the Constitution of India to vote. “But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”. If only the parliamentarians who vented their anger against a 1949 cartoon last week had bothered...