The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...

CITIES MAKE one simple promise to newcomers: Sacrifice yourself to me and your children shall prosper. This promise drew Ahmed Raza, a small-time wrestler from an Uttar Pradesh village and millions like him to the capital of newly-independent India. Raza kept his part of the bargain, yet half a century later, his daughter was pushed out of the city her father helped build, the only home she has known. “I...

India must resist developed country pressure to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, goes the cry. Such a position helps only the rich, in a tearing hurry to grow richer, the environment be damned. It is in the interest of India’s poor for the country to adopt a stringent policy regime to control emissions domestically and thus contribute to a binding deal to cut emissions globally. Climate change has been identified...

Indian policymakers are debating doing away with the mandatory rating of financial instruments in the long-term, among a set of measures aimed at strengthening the regulatory and disclosures regime for credit ratings. The expert group, set up by the High Level Coordination Committee on Financial Markets (HLCCFM), has made specific recommendations on improving and disclosing the way credit rating agencies rate financial instruments, and has sought debate on the very...

Twenty-five years have passed since that night of terror and death in Bhopal, which saw a cloud of deadly gases explode out of a faulty tank in a pesticide factory and silently spread into the homes of sleeping people. Although no official count of casualties has ever been done, estimates based on hospital and rehabilitation records show that about 20,000 people died and about 5.7 lakh suffered bodily damage, making...