But will have to move on a low carbon trajectory to minimise impact of climate change A month before the heads of state meeting in Copenhagen on climate change, Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday that India was willing to be isolated but would not accept legally binding emission cuts. In the same breath, he said domestically India would have to be relentless...

Without urgent progress which will stimulate funding for renewables, nations could be locked into high-carbon energy and transport technologies for decades, inflating another unsustainable economic bubble, say experts. Achim Steiner, the head of the U.N. environment programme, said: “Far more worrying [than formally ratifying a treaty] is that every month we delay we send a ambiguous signal into the world economy, the markets, investors and R&D.” The markets had not...

Only a process of reverse migration based on the Gandhian model can save India’s cities, and also rural India.  A report prepared by the United Nations Development Programme reveals that in India’s big cities more than 40 per cent of the people live in slums. Some of them have reasonable levels of income, but cannot afford other housing. For many reasons including the population load, slums are unhygienic. It is...

India is still perceived to be one of the most corrupt countries by the transparency international in its annual corruption perceptions. India has been ranked 84th in the list of 180 countries in terms of public-sector corruption, which is perceived to be highly corrupt. While releasing the list of naming and shaming the world's most corrupt countries, the international watchdog has for the first time recommended that tax havens like Switzerland...

Japan on Wednesday said that greenhouse gases emission rate in China and India had reached an alarming proportion and hoped that a legally binding agreement would be arrived at Copenhagen to prevent global warming. Talking to journalists from South East Asia here on Wednesday, Yoshiko Kijima, senior negotiator for Climate Change, Climate Change Division, International Cooperation Bureau, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that an agreement at Copenhagen was also important...