It is clearly the absence of political will rather than a paucity of ideas that is responsible for the country's agrarian crisis. EXACTLY seven years ago this month, the Commission on Farmers' Welfare, appointed by the government of Andhra Pradesh, submitted its report to the then Chief Minister, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy. His Congress government assumed offICE earlier that year replacing the Telegu Desam Party regime led by N. Chandrababu Naidu, which...

A report of the National People's Tribunal on the 2008 riots in Kandhamal, Orissa, is out. The report that runs into 197 pages points out that the brutality of the violence falls within the definition of 'torture' under international law, particularly the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.   According to the tribunal, headed by JustICE A P Shah, communal forces used religious conversions as an issue for political mobilisation...

The scheme seeks to add a superstructure of digital empowerment without laying an adequate foundation Until recently, S. Dhibeka, 16, who had never used a computer until she chose the computer science stream last year at the aging, leafy Kakkalur Government Higher Secondary School near Chennai, could practise programming for only an hour or two a week, often sharing a desktop computer with one or more of her classmates. But since September,...

Plutarch's Life of Dion contains an interesting anecdote of Dionysius, an avowed and established tyrant, killing his captain, Marsyas. Marsyas had dreamt of cutting Dionysius's throat, and Dionysius killed Marsyas on account of his dream. He based his decision on the assumption that Marsyas would not have dreamt of such a thing by night if he had not thought of it by day. In his seminal work The Spirit of Laws...

-The United Nations   Temperatures this year are the tenth highest on record since 1850, and the highest ever in a year which experienced a La Niña event, a meteorological phenomenon which is supposed to have a cooling influence on Earth’s atmosphere, a United Nations agency reported today. The findings are among the highlights of the provisional UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Statement on the Status of the Global Climate, which provides an...