Social anthropologists have long used the technique of learning tribal languages and adopting tribal customs to understand tribal peoples. There’s a new class of sociology students in Chhattisgarh now — the police. Bastar police are studying tribal behaviour to recoup what they think is lost in the linguistic and cultural GAP with the local population. The problems of communication, the police believe, lead to suspicion and miscommunication, and push local people...

-The United Nations    Ensuring global food security while striving to save the Planet from damage are the greatest challenges of this century, a senior United Nations official said today, stressing the need to enable smallholder farmers to become more resilient to climate change and to produce more food in ways that are environmentally sustainable. “There is no trade-off between feeding people and saving our Planet,” said Kanayo F. Nwanze, the President of...

A 73-page draft negotiating text was issued at the end of the first week of climate talks in the South African city of Durban. The text, issued by the chair of the Bali track of the negotiations, is an "amalgamation" of draft texts and will provide the basis for the final document that will be considered by the Conference of Parties or the general assembly of the 193 countries and...

-The Times of India   The Supreme Court on Friday ordered an investigation into whether the benefits of government's welfare programmes like NREGA were reaching the intended beneficiaries and to fix accountability for ensuring that they do, in what is going to be a gigantic exercise. A bench of Justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya appointed senior advocate Indu Malhotra as amicus curiae and asked her to study the details...

When psychologists identified the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance — the ability to believe two contradictory things at the same time — they might have been describing the world of international climate change negotiations. Only this month, two authoritative international agencies have pointed out that the world has only a few years left in which to begin taking sufficient action to combat dangerous global warming. The United Nations Environment Programme's Bridging the Emissions...