The convulsions that have gripped the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) — India’s flagship city development programme — with only three years to go for the termination of its assigned lifespan of seven years, is symptomatic of the country’s predilection to put politics above all other issues, including the vital ones. The Mission, aimed at pulling India’s 63 cities out of their dilapidation, which is somewhat reminiscent of...

The G8 countries have promised to increase the spending on agricultural development by $20 billion over the next three years. The amount is woefully less than the $44 billion that will be needed each year to end malnutrition.  At the world leaders’ meeting in Copenhagen, it is imperative that governments pledge to adopt up-to-date technologies to boost food production as well as outweigh the negative impacts of climate change. A...

The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...

People of dalit communities in the Gadarwara sub-division of district Narsinghpur in Madhya Pradesh are on the brink of starvation as they are facing harassment, economic sanctions and social boycott because they have refused to remove animal carcasses. A fact finding team of civil society organisations says that dalits at many places have been ‘imprisoned’ in their own houses as all entry and exit points have been blocked by the...

The Anderson saga is one more reminder that the powerful can always count on official help.  In the fall of 2002, Greenpeace campaigner Casey Harell paid a surprise visit to the New York State private estate of Warren Anderson, and found him living a “life of luxury”. Nothing odd about the discovery except that in the eyes of the law Mr. Anderson was untraceable, and had been so since 1992...