The National Green Tribunal's decision to suspend the environmental clearance given to Posco vindicates the project's critics. ON March 30, the Principal Bench of the newly formed National Green Tribunal (NGT) delivered a momentous decision suspending the environmental clearance (EC) given to the South Korean transnational corporation, Posco, to set up an integrated steel plant at Paradip in Odisha's Jagatsinghpur district. The former Union Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam...

India is coming under increasing pressure from the U.S. and the European Union for the strict patentability criteria it applies for medicines. AS was only to be expected, the two landmark decisions made by the Indian patent office in recent times concerning pharmaceutical patent cases have not gone down well with the multinational drug industry. First, there was the rejection in 2006 of the patent application by the Swiss multinational...

With regional disparities, the target of four per cent agricultural growth remains elusive The importance of agriculture in the Indian economy becomes quite clear just before the monsoons. Though other sectors contribute a greater share to the national income, more than three quarters of India’s rural population is still dependent on agriculture as the primary driver of income. India has come a long way from an era of vulnerability to food shortages...

A healthcare model relying mainly on people from within the community to provide care is reaping success One of India’s most backward districts and Maharashtra’s worst ranked in human development indicators, Gadchiroli, today finds itself at the forefront of a healthcare revolution that can potentially save millions of infant lives and help India rapidly reduce her abysmal infant mortality rate (IMR). Under the aegis of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), India...

Evidence that poverty has declined since India began to liberalise in the 1980s, that the acceleration in growth to 8-9% range since the mid-2000s has resulted in accelerated poverty reduction and that these trends hold for each broad social group rather than just the aggregate population is as irrefutable as it gets in social sciences. In the accompanying graphic, taken from a recent study by Megha Mukim and the author, show...