A seminar titled Food Security and Sustainability in India, organized at Amritsar between 7 and 8 November by the GAD Institute of Development Studies, a NGO, at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, brought together government officials, scientists, academicians and NGOs so as to generate discussions and debates surrounding climate change and global warming and their impact on agriculture. The Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change is going to take place between...

AS YOU drive west from Baroda — Gujarat’s cultural capital — towards the coast, it is hard not to marvel at the smooth, fourlane Vadodara-Bharuch National Highway Number 8, which gets you there. The only signs that suggest one is not on cruise control in an SUV somewhere on an expressway in America are occasional roadside dhabas with Indian names and poor passers-by, clad in saris or dhotis. Dwarfed by...

In a recent lecture, delivered in Mumbai in memory of Nani Palkhivala, the home minister, P. Chidambaram, attacked “left-leaning intellectuals” and “human rights groups”, who, in his view, “plead the naxalite cause ignoring the violence unleashed by the naxalites on innocent men, women and children”. “Why are the human rights groups silent?” asked the home minister. The short answer is that they aren’t, and haven’t been, silent. There are very...

A Human Rights Watch report emphasises the need for a system of recording and investigating all maternal deaths.  THE maternal mortality ratio (MMR) is calculated by the number of maternal deaths for every 100,000 births. Consider this: In 2005, India’s MMR was 16 times that of Russia, 10 times that of China and four times higher than that in Brazil. Why should there be such high maternal mortality rates in...

A UN Habitat publication warns that inequalities and worsening informal settlements (read slums) could lead to widespread violence and chaos in the cities and towns of the world. The newly-released report titled “Planning Sustainable Cities: Global Report on Human Settlements 2009” says that with almost 200,000 new dwellers flooding into the world cities and towns each day, there is an urgent need to check the mushrooming of such settlements. The...