“The Empowered Committee is looking into all aspects of safety of the dam” There is nothing serious, grave or emergent about the safety of the Mullaperiyar dam warranting our interference at this stage, the Supreme Court observed on Tuesday and asked Tamil Nadu and Kerala not to arouse people's feelings and create a fear psychosis. The Empowered Committee, headed by the former Chief Justice of India, A.S. Anand, was looking into all...

The government believes it is more important to be seen to be doing things than to be doing them well. The proposed food security legislation is another example of this tendency. The legislation exemplifies the self-defeating obduracy of bureaucratic modes of thinking. But the debate around it also exemplifies a failure of intellectual argument in India. Our debates often have this character. First, we spend a lot more time arguing...

Buying and running cars and two-wheelers could soon become a costly affair with a Planning Commission working group suggesting a green surcharge of Rs 2 on every litre of petrol, a green cess of 3% of the annual insured value of all private vehicles and a steep urban transport tax to be collected at the time of purchase of private vehicles.  The panel, headed by Delhi Metro chief E Sreedharan, has...

-The Economic Times   The Durban meet on climate change seems to work out fine for India. The conference has decided on a roadmap to curb emissions of greenhouse-causing gases by both developing and advanced economies; the actual accord is to be firmed up by 2015 and take effect in 2020. The rich, industrialised economies now need to walk the talk and take concrete action to significantly curb their carbon emissions. And...

-The Hindu   All measures have been taken to maintain the safe mode of critical systems with skeletal staff at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in spite of work coming to a halt at the project site following protests, S.S. Bajaj, Chairman, Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), said on Thursday. Interacting with the media on the sidelines of the 43rd annual conference of the Society of Nuclear Medicine (India), Dr. Bajaj said that...