Development models that focus attention on the poor while expanding job opportunities, increased government spending on social services and aid flows from affluent nations are all successful strategies for alleviating global poverty, the United Nations says. Access to low carbon energy and mobilizing domestic capital by, for example, improving tax collection, are the other factors the UN Development Programme (UNDP) identifies in a new report as crucial factors for the...

The revolution of the 1960s saved decades worth of greenhouse gas emissions. The Green Revolution of the 1960s raised crop yields and cut hunger — and also saved decades worth of greenhouse gas emissions, a study concludes. U.S. researchers found cumulative global emissions since 1850 would have been one third as much again without the Green Revolution's higher yields. Although modern farming uses more energy and chemicals, much less land needs...

Bhopal marked the horrific beginning of a new era. One that signalled the collapse of restraint on corporate power.  Over 20,000 killed. Over half a million victims maimed, disabled or otherwise affected. Compensation of around Rs.12,414 per victim on average on the 1989 value of the rupee. ($470 million or Rs.713 crore. And that divided among 574,367 victims.) Over a quarter-of-a-century's wait. To see seven former officials of Union Carbide...

Ram Prasad Ghosal, a potato farmer from Bamunpara (Dist Burdwan) in West Bengal, owns 10 acres of land. Just two months earlier, though, his ilk faced a major scare. The region witnessed a bumper potato crop of 9.5 million tonnes — 73 per cent higher than last year’s production. Wholesale prices in Kolkata crashed to Rs 300 a quintal. Retail prices, too, dropped to Rs 6-8 a kg. Farmers were...

The Planning Commission, in a letter to the Punjab government, has expressed “serious concern” about the “rapidly deteriorating situation regarding groundwater” in Punjab, and asked the state to reconsider its policy of free power to farmers, which “is contributing to over drawal” of groundwater. These are unquestionably questions we should be asking. Of course, these questions are embedded in a larger set of issues — the unreformed nature of electricity...