The Bikaner Development Authority Bill, 2025, passed by the Rajasthan Assembly, aims to establish a Bikaner Development Authority to regulate development activities in the Bikaner district. The bill was passed by voice vote, with the opposition Congress walking out of the House due to insufficient discussion. The bill was introduced …
The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) has started a 1,300-km yatra (journey) "to bind the valley together" against "destructive development". The yatra is an important step in the NBA's effort to augment the support of the people affected by dozens of dams under the Narmada Valley Development Project, even as negotiations …
THE US Congress approval of less than the requested funding for the world's poorest countries has put the International Development Agency (IDA) of the World Bank in trouble. Though the Clinton administration had requested an annual contribution of $1.25 billion to meet its three-year commitment of $3.75 billion, the Congress …
IN THE wake of economic liberalisation, the need to streamline the country's research and development (R&D;) institutions acquires a sense of urgency. However, ongoing protests by scientists at two leading institutions over who should head these bodies highlight the difficulties of implementing such measures. In the first case, relating to …
THE BELIEF that economic liberalisation and competition will motivate India's industry to upgrade its research and development has become almost axiomatic. However, a study of private sector R&D;, carried out by the Delhi-based Centre for Technology Services (CTS) and sponsored by the department of science and technology (DST), shows this …
EVERY DAY, in all weather conditions, scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) receive data about the earth from spaceborne satellites that use specialised RADAR equipment. But converting these data into high resolution image of the earth is a mindboggling task: To process an image of a 100 km …
HOW MUCH oil would be needed to replace all the firewood used in the developing world? According to one set of calculations, just about one-twentieth of all the oil used by the world. But for women in the developing world, access to this oil would mean relief from hours of …
How do you see globalisation as a phenomenon, particularly where globalisation will mean only economic integration, and not a political one? Globalisation has a number of dimensions, which are now more or less integrated. Personally, I don't think globalisation has brought about only economic integration. Political integration has also taken …
ZIMBABWE'S magnificent game parks are a big tourist draw, but until recently, the people of the surrounding areas did not feel they had a stake in the parks' success. Poaching, too, had become a major problem. Now, wildlife conservation in the country is being made to work differently - by …
THE CAUVERY, one of the major interstate rivers of south India, has been both a blessing and a curse to Karnataka and Tamil Nadu: it has helped farmers but also caused discord. Irrigation from the Cauvery has been more developed in Tamil Nadu than Karnataka. The reason is geological: Whereas …
LESS THAN a week before he faced a no-confidence motion in Parliament in July, Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao found time to keep an appointment with 25 top scientists. The meeting, called at the instance of minister of state for science and technology P R Kumaramangalam, was ostensibly a …
For 50 years the Mettur dam was completed. Tamil Nadu farmers used more than 75 per cent of the Cauvery waters, which was largely responsible for the tremendous escalation in rice cultivation in the state. The crisis, however, set in after Karnataka began developing its irrigation system based on the …
THE MAN who moved the Supreme Court in ???? to constitute a tribunal to solve the dispute over the Cauvery waters between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu was S Ranganath, secretary of the Tamil Nadu Cauvery Delta Farmers' Association. Says Ranganath, "A legal solution had to be found. We had no …
AS THE Cauvery water dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu lurches from one deadlock to another, water resources experts in India are even more disturbed at the prospect of a larger crisis. The "resource hysteria" generated by the Cauvery tangle may just be a precursor to similar "flashpoints" in India, …
Western scientists set the trends RAGHAVENDRA GADAGKAR TO BEGIN with, we must realise there is a lot that is right with it. Even without considering those Indian scientists working outside the country, a significant number of Indian scientists have individually excelled in their fields of research and are easily comparable …
A BIBLIOGRAPHY is useful not only as a guide to further study and research, but also because it gauges the current attitudes and obsessions prevalent in academia. Researchers in the North are slowly waking up to a fact long recognised by activists and writers in the South: that environmental issues …
AS PART of a plan to improve the effectiveness of its lending, the World Bank has raised by 12 per cent the budget for its supervision activities for the current year. To manage projects better, the Bank intends to classify them according to country instead of project by project. The …
THOUGH one dislikes pessimists who seem to have given up on our collective ability to put development onto a genuinely sustainable path, the fact remains they have enough evidence to demonstrate their case. The pace of destruction continues to outstrip our paltry efforts to limit the social and environmental impacts …
This book is a collection of papers from the inaugural conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics held in 1990 in Washington. The society defines ecological economics as the study of "the ecology of humans and the economy of nature," and of "the web of interconnections uniting the economic …
FOR AFRICA, by Africa, is the World Bank's new slogan while handling the continent's economic problems. V K Jaycox, vice president for the African region, recently said the Bank would no longer dictate development plans to African nations, would stop "imposing" foreign expertise on the governments and aim at "building …
ALL THROUGH the second half of the 20th century, whenever Western governments have seen their industries lagging behind globally, they have resorted to updating their technology policies. The result has been that technology strategies became the key to economic growth not only in the US and in several European nations, …
