The government, the largest owner of landed property in the country, is preparing a comprehensive land sale policy to raise revenues and check corruption in government-owned property deals. The finance ministry will shortly move a cabinet note for bringing in a new uniform policy on 'land alienation' by government agencies, with an eye on removing discretionary powers of individual ministers and bureaucrats, said a government official. In big cities, large tracts...

The lesson for India after Durban is that it needs to formulate an approach that combines attention to industrialised countries’ historical responsibility for the problem with an embrace of its own responsibility to explore low carbon development trajectories. This is both ethically defensible and strategically wise. Ironically, India’s own domestic national approach of actively exploring “co-benefits” – policies that promote development while also yielding climate gains – suggests that it...

It would be grave folly to recoil from the N-option, our safest Nuclear Is Clear     The world needs cheap energy and, as of now, nuclear plants are the most efficient means to that end     Switching to fossil fuel sources will add to global warming. In extremis, the oceans could boil away.     The lesson from Fukushima is no worse than that tsunamis are a danger to everything in their path *** After the...

“Only one third of the journey has been completed” The last case of wild polio virus reported in India was exactly one year ago, on January 13, when stool samples showed that 18-month-old Rukhsar Khatoon in West Bengal had polio. She has since recovered, but it is the progress of whittling down from the largest number of cases in the world to zero that is fascinating to public health experts globally. Clearly,...

  -PTI Experts from the University of Oxford and Indian researchers are looking into the impact of climate change policies on India's informal economy, and to diagnose ways of reducing CO2 emissions and improving jobs.  By and large the global response to climate change has ignored informal economies and yet the larger part of India's economy and almost all its jobs are informal and not directly affected by government policy, a university release...