* Secondary education is critical in breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty. * The number of secondary school students is expected to increase from 40 to 60 million over the next decade. * India needs to prepare now for this expansion and improve the quality of secondary education provided. In today’s global knowledge economy, education plays a vital role in determining a country’s economic growth and its people’s standards of living. Importantly,...

Primarily to address issues related to spending and implementation India’s apex planning body is drawing up a set of proposed reforms for the country’s flagship rural job guarantee programme, primarily to address issues related to spending and implementation. The changes proposed under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) will be sent to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by the end of this month for consideration, said Mihir Shah, member, Planning...

The agricultural sector is both an emitter of greenhouse gases and a victim of global warming. Technological change, water utilisation and cropping pattern in agriculture have implications both for emission reduction and adaptation. While hydrocarbons and raw material-based industries contribute to global warming, their productivity is not necessarily affected by the phenomenon, as is the case in agriculture. Agricultural production impacts climate change and, in turn, is impacted by it....

There is a real fear that the Kyoto Protocol will be killed soon Two years ago, amidst much fanfare, a United Nations ministerial meeting in the fabled island of Bali adopted a “roadmap” for tackling climate change. The roadmap laid down two tracks for progress, corresponding to the two international agreements on climate change — the Kyoto Protocol and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. With regard to the first...

Energy security is a major objective of all countries. Some are proactive and aggressive in this pursuit, like China; others like India are slow and procrastinate on major decisions and allow hope to overtake realistic assessments. This makes energy security in the foreseeable future an uncertain goal for India. Any discussion of energy security must keep in mind the Indian realities. Although in overall terms of commercial energy use to...