What does the Niira Radia tapes, Wikileaks and whole body scanners have in common? It is the end of privacy both for the public individual or the private one. For the public individual, every thing that they speak or write can now be put in public domain. A quarter of a million cables from US Embassies around the world, some of them marked highly confidential are now public. So are...

There is clearly a direct trade-off between exploitation of natural resources and conservation of environment and human habitat . In the past, due to lower environment consciousness, the trade-off was always decided in favour of exploitation. This is deplorable. Yet, environmental fundamentalism can also exact a high cost that will prevent a number of people to remain without access to basic necessities of life. This apparently intractable trade-off has to be resolved....

The Kerala government has decided to detoxify' Kasaragod district which has been bearing the brunt of indiscriminate spraying of the highly toxic endosulfan in cashew plantations for the last two decades. All highly toxic Red and Yellow categories of pesticides, including endosulfan, will be banned in the district and the soil and water bodies will be frequently monitored for pesticide content to enable remedial measures, state agriculture minister Mullakkara Retnakaran told...

India wants an eight-point pledge from the US and other developed countries at Cancun before yielding to their demand that developing nations must agree to international consultation and analysis (ICA) for Monitoring domestic climate actions. A strategy paper on New Delhi's stand at the conference says that India has agreed, in principle, to the idea of ICA but with specific riders in place. And specifies that the details would be put...

A widening corruption scandal that has touched India’s prime minister sent the country’s stock markets down sharply on Friday and threatened to tarnish the country’s image as a rising economic power. Setting off the turmoil was a report from the country’s auditor earlier this week that about $40 billion in wireless spectrum license fees had been squandered by the government’s telecommunications and information technology minister. On Thursday, India’s Supreme Court criticized...