India's reported willingness to relax its ceiling on cotton exports to accommodate the Pakistani demand for the commodity if Pakistan will permit the overland export of onions is a welcome development. The floods in Pakistan affected some portion of its cotton crop, and the country is now short of the commodity for its domestic textile and yarn industry, the mainstay of its fragile economy; heavy and unseasonal rains have caused...

A Supreme Court judgment projects the historical thesis that India is largely a country of old immigrants and that pre-Dravidian aborigines, ancestors of the present Adivasis, rather than Dravidians, were the original inhabitants of India. If North America is predominantly made up of new immigrants, India is largely a country of old immigrants, which explains its tremendous diversity. It follows that tolerance and equal respect for all communities and sects are...

The debate on the climate negotiations, instead of discussing the nature of any policy shift, should define the national position and determine red lines for future negotiations. A new paradigm has emerged at Cancun. Instead of the multilaterally agreed emissions reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol, there is now a shared target for all countries, where deep cuts in greenhouse gases are required according to science. Developed countries are to take...

The recent social impact assessment report of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences TISS) on the Jaitapur power plant is a people's report and not a scientific one, according to S.K. Jain, Chairperson and Managing Director of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) which is implementing the project. Addressing the media on Friday after the commissioning of the spent fuel reprocessing plant by the Prime Minister, Mr. Jain...

The rapid growth of global markets has not seen the parallel development of social and economic institutions to ensure balanced, inclusive and sustainable growth. Although we may not have yet reached “the end of history,” globalisation has brought us closer to “the end of geography” as we have known it. The compression of time and space triggered by the Third Industrial Revolution —roughly, since 1980 — has changed our interactions with...