-The Economic Times   The movement against corruption that the erroneously labelled 'Gandhian' Anna Hazare has spearheaded has had some positives. For one, it brought into sharp focus wide public anger against the malaise of endemic corruption. Two, it reaffirmed the role of civil society members in intervening and shaping public discourse. And, three, it generally shook up a system inert to, if not actively resistant to, any genuine measures to tackle...

-Bloomberg Talks on EU climate policies may get new impetus after Denmark takes over the rotating presidency in January The European Union (EU) is set to resume talks early next year about moving to a stricter carbon goal after countries worldwide backed its plan to start work toward a climate treaty that will be enacted by 2020. Europe pledged on Sunday after the conclusion of a two-week United Nations (UN) climate summit in...

How deluded we are when we think that when an important piece of legislation is introduced, policymakers carefully scrutinise it for some room for improvement. Indian democracy is good at passing progressive-sounding legislation that becomes unpopular later for poor implementation and a consequent feeling of letdown and therefore resentment. Often the problems of poor implementation that surface later stem from small mistakes in design that could have been corrected at...

-The Hindu   The Ministry has established a “disastrous precedent” The environmental clearance granted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to Lavasa is illegal as the MoEF is not a competent authority to grant the clearance, a petitioner argued during the hearing of the Lavasa matter in the Bombay High Court here on Monday. Suniti S.R., a petitioner who filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) against the project on behalf of the...

-The Telegraph   The main points agreed upon in the Durban talks: Kyoto protocol extension After the failure of Copenhagen in 2009 to come up with a new, internationally-binding deal and only incremental progress a year later in Cancun, a partial legal vacuum had loomed as drafting a new UN treaty is extremely time-consuming. Sunday’s deal extends Kyoto, whose first phase of emissions cuts run from 2008 to the end of 2012. The second commitment...