World Bank indicted for meddling with India's policies
criticism against the World Bank (wb) has just become strident. At a time when India has become the biggest recipient of wb loans, a people's tribunal in Delhi has accused the bank of trying to
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UK breathes easy after Ripa di Meana's exit
New EC environment commissioner Jacques Delors is expected to take a much softer stand on England's environmental transgressions
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Exposed
Fraud by Leh Berry s officials
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Bending rules
How Vedanta's refinery came up How did Vedanta complete its refinery on schedule amid this fuss? With a little bit of help from the Orissa government and moef, it seems. Despite
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Stop trade
Soligas harvested forest produce. For them, it was a sustainable business. Then, irrationally, government moved to
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The Marriott's sea lounge
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Chhattisgarh proactive in checking illegal BT rice trials
chhattisgarh became the first state to actively initiate action against biosafety violations in trials of genetically modified Bt rice in India. Besides ordering an enquiry into the matter, the
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New nabobs
Will SEZs be fiefdoms, beyond the law?
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AIDWA hails focus on agrarian crisis
The All-India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) has hailed Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's initiative of taking cognisance of the huge agrarian crisis and taking steps to bring relief to farmers, who include a large number of women also. In a statement, Subhashini Ali, president, and Sudha Sundararaman, general secretary of the AIDWA, said the measures for debt waiver and debt relief did not, however, address the critical issue of loans taken from private moneylenders. Secondly, many regions in the grip of crisis such as Vidharbha and Rayalaseema were dry land, where individual holdings were usually more than two hectares, eligible for relief. The crucial question of reduction in the rate of interest to 4 per cent on agricultural loans was ignored. Finally, it was not just debt relief but rejuvenation of the entire agricultural sector through a massive increase in public spending that would alleviate this crisis, the statement said. After four years, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government heeded to the voice of lakhs of anganwadi employees but their demand for an increase in wages was met only partially. Secondly, the budget did not reflect the allocations for universalisation of the Integrated Child Development Services and make 14 lakh anganwadi centres functional by the end of 2008 as per a Supreme Court directive, especially at a time when child malnourishment and infant mortality continued to remain high. Given the huge increase in the prices of essential commodities, especially wheat, rice, pulses, it was expected that the budget would suggest measures to curb inflation, which was exacerbated by the recent increase in fuel prices. Food security The statement said the UPA gave an undertaking in the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) to strengthen the public distribution system and move towards universalising it. However, the meagre increase in the food subsidy allocation from Rs. 31,456 crore last year to Rs. 32,667 crore was hardly adequate to ensure basic food security for more than 70 per cent of the population that lived below poverty line. "This cannot meet the needs of food-deficit States such as Kerala, as well as States that were adversely affected by the recent cuts in allocations of foodgrains,' it said. The allocations for health and education remained far below the targets set in the CMP and the decision to shift the burden of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to the States showed the lack of commitment of the Centre to implement the constitutional guarantee of right to education. "As far as gender budgeting is concerned, we welcome the fact that more Ministries had provided a gender budget analysis of their expenditure,' the statement added.
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Where development spells misery
For Singrauli residents, each new project has meant another displacement
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DEHRADUN
It is a sight which Suresh Rawat, a hotelier in the hill station of Mussourie that overlooks the town of Dehradun in Uttar Pradesh, could do without. Every winter, thick blue smoke envelops this
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Incompetence at its best
Traffic management in India is contrary to that in any sensible country in the world
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For all that is green
Standing today at the threshhold of a doom 04t can happen actually in a split second in the form of a nuclear holocaust or a germ warfare, the efforts at salvaging the environment should ideally be people oriented
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ublic outcry greets uranium mining project in AP
“There is radiation everywhere on earth. Mining in Nalgonda will not increase it.” This comment of S D Prasad, adviser to public sector undertaking Uranium Corporation of India Limited, typifies the Indian authorities’ disregard for the impact of uranium
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The East Coast Road to ecological disaster
Work on the Madras Cuddalore stretch of the East Coast Road has been suspended following objections that construction had begun without the required environmental clearance
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Span Resorts: motel mayhem
Was the motel owned by a former environment minister's relatives really responsible for destroying the pristine banks of the Beas? The apex court thinks so, but question marks persist
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Mundra SEZ spells displacement for fisherfolk
Livelihoods of fisherfolk is at stake as the Mundra special economic zone (sez) on the northern shore of the Gulf of Kutch gets underway. Potentially the largest sez in the country, it covers 28 km
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Goa CM against Centre's SEZ plans
On New Year's eve, Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat declared that his government had decided "to do away with' the special economic zones (sezs) in their present form and had asked the centre to
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Cosmetic concern
At a time when USA is banning MTBE , Indian public sector companies, with the blessings of the petroleum ministry babus, are promoting its use
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Selling coal to Newcastle
The wood market today needs to be organised in a way that millions of wood farmers can meet the country s growing wood needs