November 2009

India’s commendable action of promoting environment friendly economic development provides more hope for the Copenhagen climate talks.
As the countdown to Copenhagen has begun, India is fast positioning itself as a resourceful and responsible leader ready to meet the climate change challenges head on. The fact that the country has already set up a Ministry to promote alternative sources of energy and has targetted to cut carbon emissions by 2020 demonstrates that it takes the climate (…)

TRIBUTE
G.K. Arora, who was a Special Secretary in the PMO during Rajiv Gandhi’s stewardship of the country in the eighties, passed away in New Delhi on November 5. A brilliant product of the Allahabad University, he was the trusted lieutenant of D.P. Dhar, the Indian ambassador in Moscow, during the Brezhnev period of the USSR in the seventies. He has been branded as a “pro-Moscow man with a Marxist crap” by those who knew him from a distance, but those who saw him from close quarters and (…)

Is the inexorable march of the NATO-led coalition forces, through the cobweb of insurgency in Afghanistan led by non-state actors, coming to a grinding halt? It is no longer a mere wishful thinking by the resurgent Taliban that the NATO-led forces are on the brink of defeat; rather it appears to be an ineluctable destiny for the US-spearheaded International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) unless bolstered by an invigorating strategy and further resources. This is the prognosis put forth by (…)

The increase in the number of civil cases in a country is its social mascot, as it symbolises the abundance of law abiding civilised citizens accepting the authority of the judiciary to get their grievances redressed. Otherwise, they would have turned to self-retaliation or employed roughnecks, a usual practice in America and Britain enkindled by their criminal heritage, to enforce justice in their own way; hence all civil litigants may be reputed for their civility. But the increase in the (…)

While Parliament’s winter session opened on a stormy note today with the entire Opposition in the Lok Sabha disrupting its proceedings by protesting against the Union Government’s new sugarcane price regime that strikes at the root of offering remunerative price for sugarcane especially to farmers in UP and discourages the States from fixing a higher cane price, the most positive development of the day was the Bangladesh Supreme Court upholding the High Court verdict handing over death (…)

The CIA and Democrats in the US Congress have lately come in conflict with each other on the clandestine attempts by the Agency’s officials to formulate plans for hunting down and killing, in the aftermath of 9/11, terrorists with the help of commando teams as was done by Israel after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre. This has been revealed by an erstwhile senior US official, according to influential sections of the American media.
Officials of the CIA’s undercover spying wing, which (…)

We welcome the reports that the Government of India and the CPI (Maoist) are agreeable to the idea of talks. In the present situation talks are the only way to come to a resolution of any problem, however difficult it may be.
We reiterate that the talks should be unconditional, and that they should be held at the central level. We propose the following steps to expedite the dialogue:
1. Security forces should not move forward and should cease all operations.
2. (…)

Even a cursory glance at the daily newspaper reveals the economic mindset and the manipulation of that mindset into losing its sense of balance and well-being by the plethora of reports, articles and stories on the economic life of the Indian nation. There are all sorts of stories, statistics, credit appraisals, banking trends, FDI investment couched in the jargon of the modern economy that, curiously enough, seems to be so incongruous with the rickety jalopy that is the real India—the India (…)

The rural population is at present estimated at 85 crores. Ten per cent of the households are completely landless. Another 52 per cent have holdings of less than 0.2 hectare. The per capita agricultural land in the rural areas has come down to 0.12 hectare. According to the National Sample Survey, the annual income of an agricultural household from farming is less than Rs 12,000 and from all sources it is less than Rs 25,000. The yield per hectare is now stagnating; so are the cases of the (…)

The result of the ten bye-elections to the West Bengal Assembly held on November 7 has made several things clear. First, that the CPI-M’s political influence over the traditionally Left-minded people of the State is fading fast, its fear-some organisational strengh notwith-standing. Second, that Mamata Banerjee has emerged as the undisputed leader of the people’s struggle against the three-decade-old misrule of the CPI-M in the name of the Left Front. The battle is being and will continue to (…)