-The Hindu A key to understanding the effect of driving restrictions on emission levels would be to analyse what substitutions citizens will make for private vehicle trips during restriction hours It will be an unusual start to the New Year for Delhi. The city will be subject to the much-discussed driving restrictions, according to which between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. most private vehicle operators will only be able to take their...

-The Hindu Business Line A narrow focus on growth-led development is the cause of the world’s sustainability crisis, not its solution The world’s political leaders meet in New York today to adopt a ‘sustainable development’ agenda. On the face of it, this sounds very hopeful. It signals that finally, humanity may move towards making peace with the earth, even as it erases the shame of over two billion people still living in...

-The Hindu Thanks to the caste system, India has always been an unequal society. What is even more worrying is that inequality appears to have deepened in the past two decades The Boston Consulting Group’s 15th annual report, “Winning the Growth Game: Global Wealth 2015”, has received extensive coverage in the Indian media. The report comes on top of the Global Wealth Databook 2014 from Credit Suisse, which provides a much more...

-The United Nations A new United Nations-backed report launched today reveals that 22 million people worldwide were displaced in 2013 by disasters sparked largely by earthquakes or climate- and weather-related events - almost three times more than by conflict in the same year. The report, Global Estimates 2014: people displaced by disasters, conducted by the Norwegian Refugee Council's Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), shows that the risk of displacement due to disasters...

-New York Times News Service SHEOHAR (Bihar): He wore thick black eyeliner to ward off the evil eye, but Vivek, a tiny 1-year-old living in a village of mud huts and diminutive people, had nonetheless fallen victim to India's great scourge of malnutrition. His parents seemed to be doing all the right things. His mother still breast-fed him. His family had six goats, access to fresh buffalo milk and a hut filled...