The 2009 Global Hunger Index (GHI), released last week by the International Food Policy Research Institute, sheds renewed light on just how acute India’s hunger situation actually is. Although South Asia has made progress at combating hunger since 1990, the IFPRI report terms the GHI in the region as being “distressingly high.” India is near the bottom, ranking at 65 (out of 84 countries) with a GHI of 23.90, which the...

Energy security is a major objective of all countries. Some are proactive and aggressive in this pursuit, like China; others like India are slow and procrastinate on major decisions and allow hope to overtake realistic assessments. This makes Energy security in the foreseeable future an uncertain goal for India. Any discussion of Energy security must keep in mind the Indian realities. Although in overall terms of commercial Energy use to...

It is rare nowadays to come across people of unflinching and unquestionable integrity. It is even rarer to find in such people a strong sense of personal and intellectual honesty that demands that they interrogate their own actions and arguments with as much sincerity as they turn on others. And it is rarest of all to find such people engaged in public life, where they would constantly have to face...

Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has brought out an excellent compilation titled Climate Change, Politics and Facts. The government is planning legislation with targets for greenhouse gas emissions. Perhaps to bolster this, the Ministry of Environment and Forests has published results of five studies - NCAER/Jadavpur, TERI/MoEF, IRADE, TERI/Poznan and McKinsey - and findings have been contrasted and collated by CSE. As per all these models except for TERI/Poznan,...

NEW DELHI — When the United Nations convened its summit meeting on climate change last month, China and the United States, the two most important countries at the negotiating table, hewed to mostly familiar scripts, making promises without making too many specific commitments. Less familiar was the script followed by the third most important country at the table, India. India’s public stance on climate change is usually predictable — predictably obstinate...