We need spectacle in the capital, not mundane things like schools and hospitals in villages In the final years of the Roman Republic, the Senate kept the masses happy by distributing cheap food and staging big spectacles known as the circus games to get votes. In his satires, the Roman poet Juvenal observed witheringly that governance had been reduced to panem et circenses (bread and circus/games). He was referring to the...

Farmers in Madhya Pradesh have demanded a subsidy for practising eco-friendly measures to tackle India's soil degradation crisis, environmental group Greenpeace India said Saturday. The farmers held a public hearing in this Madhya Pradesh town to review the major soil health management support systems of the central government and its capability to solve the soil degradation crisis. Several agriculture experts, government officials, politicians and representatives of civil society attended the hearing held...

The definition of poverty has been at the core of discussions and commitments at the international level to address it and, by a logical conclusion, to eradicate it. This intent is the basis for the lofty Millennium Development Goals adopted by the UN member-states and international organisations at the beginning of this century. Now, 10 years later, the UN Summit on MDGs in New York last month was meant to...

In our frantic search for solutions to our water crisis, we tend to overlook the self-evident relationship between water, food, and energy. It is still not too late. As my colleague Tony Allan, a Stockholm Water Prize laureate says so pithily, the three are the corners of a triangle with politics and emotion at its center. About 80 percent of accessible freshwater in Asia is used for agriculture; the rest...

A standoff between the Haryana government and rice millers is threatening to derail the procurement of paddy in Haryana, with growers accusing authorities of not lifting the crop despite heavy arrival in markets. The state government said it is hopeful of settling the issue with state rice millers within a day or two, while claiming to have lifted ‘each grain’ of paddy. Peeved at the slow pace of paddy lifting at various...