A global scramble for land and mineral resources fuelled by billions of investment dollars is threatening the last remaining wilderness and critical ecosystems, destroying communities and contaminating huge volumes of fresh water, warned environmental groups in London Wednesday. No national park, delicate ecosystem or community is off limits in the voracious hunt for valuable metals, minerals and fossil fuels, said the Gaia Foundation’s report, "Opening Pandora's Box". The intensity of the...

Water is the most critical of all natural resources on which modern economies depend. Water scarcity and rapid economic advance cannot go hand-in-hand. Yet, with its per-capita water availability falling to 1,582 cu m per year, India has become water-stressed.  In 1960, India signed a treaty indefinitely setting aside 80% of the Indus-system waters for downstream Pakistan - the most generous water-sharing pact thus far in modern world history. Its 1996...

Dr Abhijit Sen is Member, Planning Commission of India. He is a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge (currently on leave as Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and has also taught at the Universities of Sussex, Oxford and Cambridge. Besides serving various think tanks in the states and at the centre, Dr Sen has been a consultant with UNDP, ILO, FAO and various other multilateral...

-The Indian Express   SC is right that natural resources are held in public trust, but its comments on allocation are simplistic In its ruling in the 2G spectrum allocation case, the Supreme Court said that auctions were the best route for allocation of finite natural resources. “While transferring or alienating the natural resources, the State is duty bound to adopt the method of auction by giving wide publicity so that all eligible...

Mamata Banerjee today lent her voice to a pitch to facilitate land acquisition for a life-saving project — an uncommon plea that betrayed the government’s frustration at the slow pace despite the urgency and the promise of generous compensation. The chief minister persuaded the people of Sunderbans to offer their land to build embankments in low-lying areas of South 24-Parganas, which were devastated by the Aila cyclone in 2009. The embankment project...