While promising to release a sum of Rs 500 crore to keep the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) running in West Bengal at the earliest, the team from the Union rural development ministry that met the state panchayat minister today forced the state to frame a policy before disbursing further allotment to the districts under the scheme. The Central team, led by its joint secretary, Mrs Amita Sharma,...

Delhi is an anxious city this monsoon season, struggling to meet an onerous deadline. Preparations continue at a feverish pace for the 19th Commonwealth Games (CWG), which will bear down on the Indian metropolis October 3-14, along with some 8,500 athletes from the 71 states and territories that were once part of the British Empire. Around-the-clock construction and spells of heavy monsoon rain have turned Delhi into a swirl of mud...

The youth will not take no for an answer. Five years on, the RTI comes of age. At four feet something, Santosh’s energy belies her petite frame. The school dropout was introduced to RTI through activist Arvind Kejriwal, and now, at Parivartan’s Sundar Nagri office, she holds fort, helping others acquire everything from BPL and ration cards to school admissions through RTI. Threats and attacks by local authorities who dubbed her...

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...

With business leaders and the Australian Government finally acknowledging the need to put a price on carbon, climate change is back on the agenda here in Australia and it's also on the agenda this week internationally. Representatives from countries around the world, including Australia, are assembling in Tianjin, China, as part of a crucially important United Nations Climate Change Conference that starts today. After last year's Copenhagen talks nearly collapsed, the...