Regulations covering public health should override personal rights and the country cannot wait any more for a good public health law. The health care industry, including institutions of medical education, hospitals and pharmaceutical businesses, have grown into behemoths that can do considerable harm in the absence of independent and effective regulatory systems. While there are no success stories in the regulation of any kind of industry in India, I will focus...

-Down to Earth World is moving towards natural capital as a measure of economic growth After using gross domestic product, or GDP, as the universal measurement of economy for six decades, the world has begun looking beyond this gold standard for measuring a country’s economy. On May 25, 10 African countries agreed to incorporate their natural capital, or value of their natural resources, into their national accounts to make better economic decisions. The...

-The Guardian 'Pathway for a sustainable future' declared, but Greenpeace says summit was failure of epic proportions Amid doubt, disappointment and division, the world's governments came together in Rio on Friday to declare "a pathway for a sustainable century". At the close of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, heads of state and ministers from more than 190 nations signed off on a plan to set global sustainable development goals and other measures to...

-The Economic Times The largest United Nations conference in history is happening now in Brazil. Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, is assembling over 50,000 people and more than 130 heads of state and government. Beyond the politicalcommitments world leaders are promising to make by the end of the summit, how can Rio+20 help us promote actual changes in policymaking towards socio-environmental synergies? The two main themes of Rio+20 - the...

If proof is needed of a policy paralysis, a recent official admission that poverty cannot be eradicated by 2020 cannot be dismissed out of hand. That this follows the Planning Commission's estimate of a rapid decline in poverty over the period 2004-05 and 2009-10 is not just intriguing but arguably schizophrenic. The former is utterly pessimistic while the latter is optimistic notwithstanding dubious price adjustments designed to deliver a favourable...