Opinions

September 21, 2012: Dear Colleagues, – September 13, 2012 was an historic day at the United Nations and in the Marshall Islands. On this day the Human Rights Council considered for the first time the environmental and human rights impacts resulting from the radioactive and toxic substances in nuclear fallout.

November 12, 2011: As the local people determinedly continue to resist the commissioning of the Kudankulam reactors, the statements of the nuclear establishment have acquired a desperate edge. The chief of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) claimed that a “foreign hand” was behind the protests.

August 12, 2011: This year’s Indian Philanthropy Forum was held in Mumbai on 29 June. Sponsored by the Ajay Piramal group, the Godrej group and the Rothschild Foundation and hosted by Dasra, the forum saw over 175 attendees.

August 11, 2011: The mining scandal which led to the unseating of a prominent leader in India's southern state of Karnataka is the latest scandal to hit the industry.

August 5, 2011: Several rural villages in India have suffered leopard attacks in recent months, most recently on Saturday in the northeastern state of Assam. In July alone, nearly 16 people were mauled in four different attacks across the country. The most serious was in the eastern state of West Bengal, where a leopard wandered into a village and injured 11 people.

July 25, 2011: Reporter Javed Iqbal debates the meaning of neutrality, objectivity and truth in the conflict zone of Dantewada, where everything seems to depend on where you stand. Are you standing between a crying mother and the barbed wire across which state officials are conducting an autopsy on her son whom they shot dead? Or across from a young boy whose leg was…

July 20, 2011: "Kicked upstairs" is how many lobbyists gleefully describe Jairam Ramesh's removal from the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests in the cabinet reshuffle on July 12.

June 27, 2011: About three decades ago, the Swedes considered the risks of nuclear energy, added up the costs and did the math. What they found was that the astronomical amounts that the Swedish economy was paying in subsidies to produce electricity from nuclear energy far exceeded what they were getting out of it.

June 25, 2011: Is India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh a smooth, cunning and crafty fox? That’s what he claimed to be at a journalism school convocation in Chennai on May 3, 2011. Invoking philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s spin on an ancient parable called The fox and the hedgehog, the minister used the metaphors to explain his stance on the environment-growth debate.

June 2011: Civil society members on India’s most important wildlife conservation committees are mostly rubber stamps, says Ashish Kothari, making these forums so much greenwash for pushing ‘development’ projects that threaten wildlife habitats.