-The Guardian  The Earth summit has to ensure sustainability is at the heart of growth models – the swelling global population depends on it Growth in itself is neither our enemy nor our problem. But what kind of economic growth do we need? And do we want growth at any cost? A child born today is one of seven billion people on Earth, and during its lifetime will see the world's population grow...

-Live Mint Latest houselisting data demonstrates a visible growth in the material well-being of the two groups Indians, all of them, across class and caste, traded up over the past decade, a period of rapid and record economic growth—that’s the counter-intuitive message in the latest update to Census 2011. According to the so-called houselisting data released by the census, scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) have, like the rest of the country,...

A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...

John Vidal, who was in Rio for the '92 Earth summit, looks back at that momentous event, and how the 2012 version compares Helicopters thundered up and down the chic Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. Tanks guarded the bridges and tunnels. The favelas were in lockdown, schools closed and supermarkets stood empty. Unexpectedly, George H W Bush, the 41st US president, flush with success at the collapse of communism, had arrived in...

-The Hindu Almost a year after Saranda was wrested out of Maoist control by security forces, large numbers of tribal families living in the dense forests of the Jharkhand district have found themselves left out in the cold when it comes to government assistance. “We discovered that just about 3,000 of the 7,000-odd forest dwelling tribal families in Saranda are on the BPL [below poverty line] list,” says Rural Development Minister Jairam...