India, like other Asian countries, has focused its climate change adaptation strategies on rural and urban areas while neglecting the urban fringes, say experts. Peri-urban areas are characterised by haphazard, accelerated expansion and are farthest from basic urban services and infrastructure, according to United Nations-Habitat’s ‘The State of Asian Cities 2010-11’. By 2020, of the projected 4.2 billion urban population of the world, 2.2 billion will be living in Asia, many...

The Supreme Court has handed down an extraordinary decision with some extraordinary arguments directing the central government to execute the “river interlinking project”. How could the Court which says “it can hardly take unto itself tasks of making of a policy decision or planning for the country on the need for acquisition and construction of river linking channels” then go on to actually take the very same policy decision and...

-The Business Standard Searching for independent assessments of govt work The rural development ministry recently proposed “independent, real-time evaluation” of the government’s flagship social welfare and development programmes, a suggestion that deserves attention not just for its pros, but also for its cons. It is true that given the explosive growth in social sector spending, effective monitoring and evaluation are ever more important. The constant hum of charges that extra money is...

-The Economic Times   Newly appointed railway minister Mukul Roy announced a rollback in some of the rail fares that were announced last week in the Rail Budget. Mukul Roy told Parliament that fares for first and second class passengers in air-conditioned carriages would still go up, but there would be no increase for other classes of travel more commonly used by the poor. "The proposal to increase (fares) will impact the...

-The Telegraph The controversial poverty data from the Planning Commission has a message for Mamata Banerjee: the Marxists have brought down the number of destitute in Bengal but much more needs to be done. Latest data suggest that the number of poor has dipped by 7.5 percentage points in Bengal between 2004-05 and 2009-10, which covers the last five years of Left rule in the state. Poverty in urban areas in Bengal came...