-PTI   Underlining the urgency to fight corruption in public life, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said it is the right time to move decisively in this direction. "Our efforts for rapid progress and development can have their full impact only if we curb corruption in public life and improve the processes of governance. I believe this is the right time to move decisively in this direction," Singh said addressing the two-day Conference...

Climate change negotiations are with us again, this time in Durban following the high-level meetings in Cancun (2010) and Copenhagen (2009). The aim is to agree on a regime to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (particularly CO2) post-2012, when the present commitments under the Kyoto Protocol run out. Climate change and global warming are important issues for India. Agriculture, which provides a livelihood for two-thirds of our population, is heavily dependent on...

Water, the most vital of all resources, has emerged as a key issue that would determine if Asia is headed toward cooperation or competition. After all, the driest continent in the world is not Africa but Asia, where availability of freshwater is not even half the global annual average of 6,380 cubic metres per inhabitant. When the estimated reserves of rivers, lakes, and aquifers are added up, Asia has less than...

Herding cattle and weaving carpets, on city waste-heaps, at traffic lights, in roadside eateries, in farms and in factories, in brick kilns and coal mines, in brothels and in our homes, children of the poor work at an age when our own are in school or at play. What is remarkable is not just our collective acceptance of such diverging destinies of children merely because of the accident of where they...

India's cabinet has approved a major new policy to develop national manufacturing. The policy aims to create a 100 million jobs in the next 10 years and allows for a series of special new zones to support manufacturing growth. At the moment, that sector only accounts for about 16% of the country's gross domestic product. That has barely changed in the last three decades and is seen as well below India's potential. It is...