-The United Nations   The United Nations launched a new web portal today focusing on helping girls and women access job opportunities, training and career advice in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. The website – girlsinict.org – was designed to inspire and help young women between the ages of 11 and 25 prepare for and pursue careers in technology by providing them with useful resources such as links to scholarships, internships,...

The lesson for India after Durban is that it needs to formulate an approach that combines attention to industrialised countries’ historical responsibility for the problem with an embrace of its own responsibility to explore low carbon development trajectories. This is both ethically defensible and strategically wise. Ironically, India’s own domestic national approach of actively exploring “co-benefits” – policies that promote development while also yielding climate gains – suggests that it...

In June 1979, an innovation in the field of law and politics came about in the form of Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. The idea behind it is identifying and publicising cases of violations of fundamental rights. For the first time a session of the tribunal was held in India in November 2011. In an interview to Jyotika Sood, the secretary general of the tribunal, Gianni Tognoni, tells how it works What is...

-The Hindu Kisan Sabha wants Prime Minister to meet agriculturists The All India Kisan Sabha has demanded that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh convene a meeting of farmers' organisations, farm scientists and economists to evolve measures to accord top priority to agriculture sector in the XII Five Year Plan. The agenda finalised at the meeting should form part of the discussions of the National Development Council so that the Centre and States could finalise...

-The Hindu   Achieving universal health coverage through an equitable system is among the key goals of India's 12th Plan. Within the overall objective of creating an entitlement-based health care system, one of the challenges is access to medicines. The High Level Expert Group instituted by the Planning Commission on Universal Health Coverage underscores serious policy distortions and inefficiencies that stand in the way of making essential medicines accessible to all. A...