But will have to move on a low carbon trajectory to minimise impact of climate change A month before the heads of state meeting in Copenhagen on climate change, Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday that India was willing to be isolated but would not accept legally binding emission cuts. In the same breath, he said domestically India would have to be relentless...

The capital got a fulsome dose of the country today, and the country a swift pledge from the capital. Within hours of swarming in from the restive western Uttar Pradesh neighbourhood and trapping New Delhi in feisty gridlock, farmers had forced a retreat by the government on sugarcane pricing and sent the Congress panicking over the electoral consequences of provoking rural anger. Rahul Gandhi, who is blue-printing the Congress’s comeback bid in...

Ahead of next month's climate change negotiations in Copenhagen there's a lot of anger in India about the West's pressure on it to sign up to emissions cuts. The BBC's Sanjoy Majumder travelled to India's most industrialised state, Gujarat, to see at first hand some very effective - if homegrown - attempts at tapping renewable energy. In the middle of an open field, a man crouches over some cow dung and...

IN 1974 Henry Kissinger, then America’s secretary of state, told the first world food conference in Rome that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years. Just over 35 years later, in the week of another United Nations food summit in Rome, 1 billion people will go to bed hungry. This failure, already dreadful, may soon get worse. None of the underlying agricultural problems which produced a spike in...

The S.C. and S.T. (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has failed to make Dalits any safer. THE ascent of the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to power in Uttar Pradesh on May 13, 2007, was seen as a defining moment in the politics of Dalit empowerment in the country. The Scheduled Caste (S.C.) leader of an avowedly “Dalit assertive” party had been Chief Minister earlier too, but the difference this time...