The Copenhagen conference will definitely go down as the worst meeting in global climate negotiations. There is a complete mess here: lines of people standing outside the Bella Centre, where the conference is taking place, wanting to get in. Inside the meeting has broken down for the umpteenth time because industrialized countries refuse to commit to cutting emissions. Instead they want the global climate agreement changed, so that they do...

The Supreme Court today dismissed a Gujarat farmer’s petition against allotment of fertile agricultural land in Sanand for Tata Motors’ Nano project. “You cannot complain that only barren land should be used for industry and not agricultural land, once the land has been taken over,” Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan said. The Narendra Modi government had allotted the 1,000 acres, about 30km from Ahmedabad, last year after Tata Motors withdrew from...

The key message of the book is that agriculture in South Asia is quite heavily stressed due to A complex set of socio-economic, agro-climatic, and hydrological factors WATER, AGRICULTURE AND SUSTAINABLE WELL-BEING: Edited by Unai Pascual, Amita Shah, Jayanta Bandyopadhyay; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 750. “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less...

"Draft treaty can be used as a starting point for further talks" Copenhagen: With climate change talks set to enter the crucial second stage here, India on Sunday rejected points in the draft treaty that wants all countries to cut emissions, agree to a peaking year and subject their mitigation actions to international scrutiny. With the official draft treaty circulated on Friday creating clear divisions among 194 countries, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh...

In energy infrastructure alone, the transformational ambitions the Copenhagen meet is expected to set will cost more than $10 trillion in additional investment.  If negotiators reach an accord at the climate talks in Copenhagen it will entail profound shifts in energy production, dislocations in how and where people live, sweeping changes in agriculture and forestry and the creation of complex new markets in global warming pollution credits. So what is...