The Millennium Development declaration was a visionary document, which sought partnership between rich and poor nations to make globalisation a force for good. Its signatories agreed to explicit goals on a specific timeline. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set ambitious targets for reducing hunger, poverty, infant and maternal mortality, for reversing the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and giving children basic education by 2015. These also included gender equality,...

The Orissa government will reply to the queries made by the Centre on the Meena Gupta panel report on Posco project in the next three days, Chief Secretary B K Patnaik said on Wednesday. “We will reply to the Centre on the panel’s reports within three days,” Patnaik told reporters here. The state government did not comment on the reports of the committee for the past two days. Smarting under the Union...

Steel giant Posco’s proposal for the largest foreign direct investment in India has failed to pass environment muster with a central panel picking flaws in the process to settle forest rights and approve the shortlisted site in Orissa. Three members of the four-person committee have recommended that the Union forest and environment ministry scrap its approvals while the remaining nominee has suggested that the exercise be carried out afresh. The panel’s recommendations...

An Indian government panel has recommended that environmental clearances for a steel plant to be built by South Korean company Posco be scrapped. The $12bn plant in Orissa is India's largest foreign investment project. Critics of the project say it will exhaust iron ore deposits in 20 years. India earlier rejected plans by mining giant Vedanta to extract bauxite in eastern Orissa state saying it would damage the local environment. A panel of India's...

Union minister of environment and forest Jairam Ramesh  has asked Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan to review the 49 mining leases given for excavation of iron ore and bauxite in Sindhudurg region. The move follows a TOI expose on the state government`s decision to approve the leases in the eco-sensitive district of Konkan Maharashtra. Ramesh`s letter to the chief minister, which attached a series of news reports that appeared in TOI...