-EPW   A paradigm shift on global strategy, but will it make a difference to climate change or only pass the buck? The United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Durban ended dramatically with a last minute agreement of sorts, which only talks about more talks to arrive at some kind of legally binding instrument that will impose emission curbs on all countries from 2020. The agreement is simply not enough in...

Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, in an article on left-wing extremism (“From Tirupati to Pashupati?” The Hindu , October 14, 2011), observed candidly: “It is not the naxals who have created the ground conditions ripe for their ideology — it is the singular failure of successive governments both in the States and the Centre.” There lay the main cause of the festering sore of naxalism, often characterised as left-wing...

Foreign direct investment in education has been stuttering in India more than a decade after it was allowed, apparently because education is a not-for-profit sector where surplus revenue has to be ploughed back into expanding the institution. India’s education sector has witnessed significant expansion since the government approved FDI in April 2000, thus providing a huge opportunity for investment. Yet FDI remained zero in the first three years, increased till 2008-09...

Dow Chemical was on Sunday reported to have agreed to remove all its branding from the London Olympic stadium following protests from campaigners here and in India over its links to 1984 Union Carbide Bhopal gas tragedy. Under a £7 million deal, Dow was to sponsor a fabric wrap that would surround the Olympic stadium in East London. A report in The Sunday Express quoted the company as saying that it was...

Viju Diwa is barely 11. So it seems strange to see him carrying bricks on his head. “He is not a labourer here,” Kisan Mhatre, a brick kiln owner of Mharal village outside Mumbai’s far northern suburb of Kalyan protests and shouts at his father and worker Arjun, 30. “They push their children into labour and then the government, the media and everyone comes to trouble us,” says Mhatre. When this DNA...