A sustainable population stabilisation strategy needs to be embedded in a rights-based and gender-sensitive local community needs-led approach. An authoritarian top-down target approach is not the answer. The evolution of government-led population stabilisation efforts in India goes back to the start of the five year development plans in 1951-52. A national programme was launched, which emphasised ‘family planning' to the extent necessary to reduce birth rates to stabilise the population at...

Mokhada, Maharashtra: In the last 15-16 years, Jhaluriben Baria has had eight children, two of whom died within five days of their birth. Her youngest child Heera Gopabhai Baria, a boy, is seven months old. The infant is ensconced in a plastic sack strung across two sticks at the entrance of their house in Panchyasan village in Devgadh Baria block of Dahod district, Gujarat. Playing alongside is his sister, Premilaben Baria....

IN APRIL this year, the Supreme Court directed the Ministry of Environment and Forests to conduct a probe into French cement giant Lafarge’s limestone mines in Meghalaya. Lafarge was alleged to have been operating on forest land without proper clearance. Now it turns out the allegations against the Paris-headquartered multinational are graver. Bangladesh-based Lafarge Surma Cement Ltd — a joint venture between Lafarge Group and Spanish cement company Cementos Morlins —...

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto turned classical capitalism on its head with his trickle-up theory: that if you create wealth at the bottom of the pyramid, it will find its way up. de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, speaks to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV’s Walk the Talk on the need for the poor to be able to participate in the global economy...

As late as 2008, about 23 years after the Bhopal gas tragedy, the state government was still involved in virtual subterfuge. Taking advantage of a curfew imposed in Indore, which was reeling under communal riots in July-August that year, the government smuggled out 40 tonnes of toxic waste from the Union Carbide factory to an incinerator 230 km away at a site in Pithampur. Apologising for the government's action, Union...