Eco-links

India's first Human Development Report needs to look beyond numbers at ecology-poverty linkages

CNG Verdict: A Legal Debate

No matter how one looks at the Supreme Court's April 5 ruling on air pollution in Delhi, it is undoubtedly a milestone in Indian judicial history.…

Book review: Panchayats, democracy and development

In 1992 the Indian Parliament approved of the 73rd constitutional amendment, which made it mandatory for state governments to devolve powers to …

Grains of doubt

Rural affairs ministry rejects wage payment in kind under rural job scheme

Anaemia rampant in women in Bageshwar

Question on employment guarantee scheme's success

Panchayat Raj Half a cheer for democracy

There is a great push to make panchayats the fulcrum of rural development in India. But 16 years after the third tier of government was created, …

Impotent plan?

In August 2005, the Indian Parliament passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (nrega). The latest avatar of state-financed employment …

A rose or a ladder?

Scheme against jobs

Government is bent upon shrinking jobs for the poor by fundamentally changing the rural employment guarantee scheme against the advice of its …

50 million a step away from starvation: Civil society seeks urgent funds

Non-governmental organisations wrote a letter to global leaders urging support

Acute hunger more than doubled in 10 countries most affected by climate change

Countries among those that emit least; 7 in Africa

India’s SDG preparedness ranking continues to decline: Report

Country faces major challenges in achieving 11 of 17 Sustainable Development Goals

Famine in Ethiopia: the roots lie in Eritrea’s long-running feud with Tigrayans

Entire region is classified “hard to reach” for aid convoys

Labour Day: 10 worrying signs from the world at its youngest

A few points on the state of works in the world

Feeble Rights

Rights-based governance has not been accompanied by effective delivery mechanism

Islamic banking with a twist

A cooperative in Bihar offers interest-free loans, but only to its poor members

Unhealthy policy

A new policy fails to address key problems of healthcare

Devolution suffers setback

India's decentralisation process receives yet another blow

In short

What is the Indian Social Forum all about?

Drop in unemployment not necessarily good news

88,000 fake ration cards

Orissa government to save Rs 40 crore by cancelling them

Rural poor lose 5% of income to heat stress every year, more vulnerable to future climate risks

Every day of extreme precipitation causes poor households to lose 0.8 per cent of their incomes relative to non-poor households

Global science funding must be redesigned to succeed on SDGs, say experts

Existing science design, funding and practice fail to address complex global issues, they pointed out