It is worrying that the Tendulkar method, chosen by the Planning Commission to calculate the poverty line in its latest figures, underestimates the levels of poverty while overestimating poverty reduction. The figures show that 29.8% or 360 million Indians were poor in 2009-10 as compared to 37.2% or 400 million in 2004-05. A poor person has been defined as one who spends R28 per day in urban areas and R22.5...
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Scientists Claim Their Place in Struggle for Food Security by Fabíola Ortiz
Weather events such as extreme temperatures and drought caused global agricultural losses of 11.4 billion dollars in 2011, while 12 million hectares of farmland are lost to land degradation every year, and unsustainable agricultural practices contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases. These and other data provided by a report released Wednesday in London by leading scientists from 13 countries raise the question of how to curb the environmental crisis, guarantee...
More »Don't rush into biofuel
-The Business Standard Learning from the jatropha mistake The tropical shrub jatropha curcas, touted a decade ago as a commercially feasible source of biofuel to alleviate the global energy crisis, seems to have let its proponents down quite comprehensively. Millions of hectares of land in the arid areas of India and in many other Asian and African countries were turned into jatropha plantations in the expectation that the oil derived from its...
More »India patent bypass delivers life-saving blow against cancer by Raja Murthy
India's decision this month to produce Germany-based multinational Bayer's anti-cancer drug Nexavar, in the first use of "compulsory licensing" in South Asia, will save lives but also raises intricate questions. Under the compulsory licensing process, a government can under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules bypass a patent owner's rights after three years and order the manufacture and sale of life-saving medicines at much cheaper cost than by obtaining the medicine from...
More »Subsidy bill reduction target ‘ambitious’-Aman Malik
The government plans to cut its subsidy bill to under 2% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012-13, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee said in his budget speech on Friday. High crude oil prices and burgeoning fertilizer subsidies, primarily on account of imported non-urea fertilizers, have meant India’s subsidy bill has zoomed to Rs2.16 trillion, or 2.5% of the GDP. Mukherjee has set an ambitious target to reduce this to under 1.75%...
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