-IPS News India's planners worry about ‘jobless growth', but perhaps nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than a policy of handing over the collection and disposal of the capital's refuse to large private corporations, leaving close to 50,000 ragpickers unemployed. For decades ragpickers provided a service to this city, scavenging waste for recyclable plastic, aluminium, glass and other materials, and earning a livelihood by selling their pickings to contractors with equipment to process...

-The Hindu Instead of opening a debate on the Gadgil panel's report on the Western Ghats, the government has chosen to sideline and replace it with another by an alternate group This is a challenging time in India's development history where a number of tenets of environmental governance are being questioned by the imperative of growth. Environmental governance in India is under assault, and is thus in need of both fresh thinking,...

-The Hindu Says potential and implications of shale gas policy need to be examined The government was all for creating a viable and competitive domestic production base and incentivise use of Clean Energy in the country, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia said at the fourth Clean Energy Ministerial here on Wednesday. Efforts were on to encourage domestic production and usage. "We are interested in incentivising the use of...

KEY TRENDS   • According to National Sample Survey report no. 583: Persons with Disabilities in India, the percentage of persons with disability who received aid/help from Government was 21.8 percent, 1.8 percent received aid/help from organisation other than Government and another 76.4 percent did not receive aid/ help *8   • As per National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), the Under-five Mortality Rate (U5MR) was 57.2 per 1,000 live births (for the non-STs it was 38.5)...

-The Hindu     The public transport system is the most effective way of reducing the number of vehicles as well as emissions Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently launched the National Electric Mobility Mission Plan (NEMMP), 2020 with an ambitious goal of shifting to electric propulsion for surface transport. This would reduce our dependence on diesel and petrol and lead to lower emission levels, including carbon-di-oxide emission, which is one of the major contributors...