-The Business Standard   Union Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan on Tuesday made it clear at the global climate change meet at Durban, South Africa, that India would not compromise on the principles of equity and historical responsibility in addressing the issue of climate change. India and China are being targeted for their high carbon emission. Talking on the sidelines of the meet, the minister said, “Equity is central to any debate on climate...

A.K. Ramanujan, while referring to the diversity and apparently contradictory element of unity in the Indian traditions, refers to an Irish joke about whether to classify trousers as singular or plural: singular from the top, plural from the bottom.1 A Concurrent Discipline Course in the University of Delhi for Second Year Honours students not doing History was introduced in 2005 on ‘Culture in India—Ancient’, and had sought to very sensitively...

Health care in India, at its finest, matches the standards of international best practice. The knowledge, skill and confidence of its doctors and nurses, the sophistication of available technology, quality of service and five-star hospitality compete with the best in the world. Its relatively low cost has made it an important player in the health tourism sector. However, at the other extreme, publicly funded health care services often do not...

Social anthropologists have long used the technique of learning tribal languages and adopting tribal customs to understand tribal peoples. There’s a new class of sociology students in Chhattisgarh now — the police. Bastar police are studying tribal behaviour to recoup what they think is lost in the linguistic and cultural gap with the local population. The problems of communication, the police believe, lead to suspicion and miscommunication, and push local people...

-The Indian Express   Harvard University has decided to remove courses taught by Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy at its annual summer school session, terming his views as "reprehensible" in a controversial piece he wrote on Islamic terrorism in India. At a meeting of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, faculty members voted with an "overwhelming majority" to remove two economics courses – 'Quantitative Methods in Economics and Business' and 'Economic Development in...