Desperately seeking skills & jobs
India has a youth bulge in its population, accounting for the largest number of young working age people in the world. This demographic …
Organic thread
Even as Bt cotton invaded Indian fields in the past few years, some farmer groups kept pushing for organic cotton. In 2009-10, production in …
Troubled Beautiful Minds
They are there—each residential area has its mentally disturbed people; each family has anecdotes of crazy relatives. Nobody wants to …
Desperate for gas
Gas is the cleanest of fossil fuels and also more efficient and cheaper to use. Yet, in India, there has been no policy focus on this fuel, …
Ensuring human survival
"The future of human civilisation could depend on our ability to defend and make sustainable use of biological diversity," he adds. FAO recently …
The statistician who "planned" India
P C Mahalanobis can rightly be called the father of Indian statistics. Today, in the year of his birth centenary, he is remembered not only as …
A wealth of anecdotal material
GLIMPSES OF INDIA'S STATISTICAL HERITAGE Edited by: J K Ghosh, S K Mitra and K.R. Parthasarathy Publisher: Wiley Eastern Limited, Delhi Price : Rs 60
Dated data
THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTERNATIONAL PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES OF WILDLIFE RESEARCH AND MANAGEMENT: ASIAN AND AMERICAN APPROACHES Edited by Stephen H …
Not too many people
Demographers say world population will decline and one-fifth of it would be above 50 years by 2050
Are your organs in the right place?
Scientists have hit on a gene that decides exactly where internal organs will be positioned in the body of a mouse
The dark side of knowledge
Beyond research spending, the gap in scientific output between developed and developing countries is glaring
Conflict over ganga
Over 2,500-odd kilometers this river meanders, flowing through the lives of over 500 million people, enabling a vast basin spread over Nepal, …
Spilling doom
As vast amount of oil is spilt into the ocean, threatening sensitive marine and coastal biology, operation clean-up has turned out to be a large …
Poor amenities
Basic services can work against poverty but are usually elusive, shows the latest World Development Report
How clean is my country?
A collation of statistics on population density, water, sanitation and hygiene for 100 countries throws up disturbing trends
Unfair price shop
Open markets to free trade, says the US. Yet it doles out sops to its farmers. Highly subsidised US produce floods global markets, bringing down …
Full-scale review of poverty
What is poverty? The Planning Commission is set to undertake an exercise to find a quantifiable answer to the question. It has proposed to the …
A safety valve!
Alarmed by super rapid industrialisation in Asia and the Pacific, the Asian Development Bank suggests urgent corporate 'voluntary' action and …
Health class
Enemies of health and allies of poverty join hand to create global havoc, leaving different marks on different classes
Tropical pill
Medicines are for the rich, not for fighting tropical diseases afflicting millions in developing nations. Pharmaceutical companies seem to have …
Watering down a success story
Water User Associations in Maharashtra face unforeseen hurdles despite being successful. Why is the government stalling them?
Apex court gets tough on entry of trucks
Supreme Court pulls up Delhi government and police for not following directive on polluting goods vehicles
The discerning eye of the insect
How do pests select which plants to attack in the field? By smelling odours plants emit, believe most entomologists. But now an alternative …
Landfill emissions poison breastmilk
After finding high levels of dioxin-related compounds in breast milk of women living near landfills, a Vadodara-based non-governmental …
Unbalanced sheet
According to the WWF Living Planet 2002 report, people are consuming more natural resources than nature can produce, and some more so than others.…