Have the Cancun Agreements set Kyoto Protocol on a path to eventual death? No. Killing Kyoto would require a 2/3rd vote by the 180-plus member countries. There is too much guilt involved in that. But the Agreements have prepared the ground to render the Protocol hollow and meaningless - left to survive a vegetative, inconsequential life even as a new and unequal global regime takes ground. The Kyoto Protocol was...

Let's assess the outcome of Cancun in terms of what the world has achieved to avert climate change. We know the threat of a changing climate is real, we in India are most vulnerable and the world needs drastic emission reduction. Just think: to keep the world below 2 degrees Celsius temperature increase, global emissions must drop to 44 billion tonnes of CO2e (all greenhouse gases) by 2020. The world...

From No. 2 in the last three years, Bengal has crawled to No. 1 — in the number of rape complaints in the country. The state that was once regarded one of the safest for women has recorded 3,029 rape cases till October this year, displacing Madhya Pradesh that had the highest number in the past three years. According to provisional data being compiled by the women and child development ministry, Bengal...

Farmana, a village in Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda's home district Rohtak, boasts of the cleanest toilets but its social indicators still reflect Haryana's feudal mindset. Its sex ratio is far below the state average. A Nirmal Gram awardee for "total sanitation programme", and also holder of the Adarsh Gram status, Farmana has a sex ratio of 648 girls to 1,000 boys — one of the low sex ratios in...

In response to growing frustration that the U.N. climate negotiations are not producing real-world results, individual nations, states and business are cobbling together patchwork solutions to preserve forests, produce clean energy and scrub pollution from the air.Under this new approach, businesses in California will offset their greenhouse gas emissions by funding tropical forest preservation in Mexico and Brazil; Japan will help pay for nuclear power plants in developing nations; and...