A new report, “Thermal Coal in Asia – Stopping the Juggernaut”, by top international energy consultants, Energy Transition Advisors Pty Ltd, has raised the alarm that India’s fossil fuel subsidies, especially those related with coal, remain a major hurdle in the country’s contribution to achieving climate change target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees centigrade.

  The World Bank has created flutter by ranking India 130th for ease of doing business in its latest flagship  report , “Doing Business Comparing Business Regulation for Domestic Firms in 190 Economies 2017”. This is in sharp contrast to the Narendra Modi government’s announcement two years ago to “improve” India’s rankings among the top 50 by 2018.

Economic costs of economic shutdowns The prestigious Centre for Technology Innovation at Brookings, in a new research paper, has found that India has had the highest number of internet shutdowns across the world, which led to an economic loss of $968 million, again the highest among the countries which resorted to internet shutdown as a political tool.

“The Global Gender Gap Report 2016”, released by the high-profile World Economic Forum, has found that while India may have improved its global gender gap ranking from 98th in 2006 to 87th in 2016, things have deteriorated on three of the four factors worked out for arriving at the gender gap index (GGI).

  Would the British National Health Service (NHS), the publicly funded national healthcare system, ban import of specific antibiotic drugs produced by Indian pharmaceutical companies, because they allegedly lead to the growth of "superbugs" infection that is allegedly resistant to antibiotics?

Ramona, Apra and Balendu Goswami In an unusual move, Ramona Goswami, whose house was attacked in Vrindavan recently for calling a private meeting of atheists, has sought the urgent intervention of the German Embassy in Delhi for “support” and “protection” of her “human rights” to live in India, so that she is not not harassed by local administration and media on basis her “belief or non-belief.” A German herself, Ramona is married to Balendu Goswami, who had organized the event. Living with their daughter Apra Goswami, who also carries a German passport and a PIO card like her, Ramona says, on October 14, her family organized the private programme on their property, “inviting scientific-minded, rationalist people to our place for discussions.” “As we are non-believers, atheists from all over the country were expected to come to our home”, she says in the letter, regretting, however, “Unfortunately some locals opposed this programme and called for protests outside our home.” Pointing o...

  Civicus Monitor, a global civil society alliance based in Johannesburg, South Africa, in its first-ever online tracking of 104 countries, has noted that the “civic space” in India is being “increasingly constrained because of government interference with the freedoms of association, expression, and peaceful assembly.”

"Netaji: Living Dangerously" being released in Ahmedabad Senior journalist Kingshuk Nag’s "investigation" into the mystery around Subash Chandra Bose’s death in his book “Netaji: Living Dangerously” – whose second edition was released in Ahmedabad on Monday – has revealed that “in all probability Bose was held in a gulag, the massive system of forced labour camps found in Siberia during the time of Stalin.”

Ten worst cities Arcadis , a leading global design and consultancy firm for natural and built assets, in a new  report  has ranked Mumbai and New Delhi lowest of the 50 cities it selected for sustainable cities water index in order to identify which cities are best placed to harness water for future success.

  A "confidential" report, paid for by the world’s renowned Copenhagen-based shipping giant Maersk, and prepared by one of the most respected consultancies in the shipping industry, Litehauz, has reportedly listed the heavy metals and hazardous chemicals that the ships leak and which can be measured in the environment around the Alang shipbreaking yard in Gujarat.

The Government of India has detected a whopping 20,000 “hidden cases of leprosy” during a massive door-to-door campaign conducted by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare from September 14 to October 4, says a  report , insisting, this is a cause of great worry.

  In a glaring instance of how Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, continued justifying the 2002 communal riots more than two months after they began, retired DGP RB Sreekumar has recalled, Modi told him in a one-to-one conversation in that violence by Hindus after the February 27 Godhra train burning was “a natural and uncontrollable reaction and no police could control and contain it.”

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, NDB President KV Kamath Amidst the high-profile BRICS summit entering the second day in Goa, two senior experts, Juana Kweitel, Programs Director of  Conectas Human Rights  in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Srinivas Krishnaswamy, CEO of  Vasudha Foundation  in New Delhi, have said that even a year after BRICS launched the  New Development Bank  (NDB), it has failed to be a “tooled” as a “real engine for sustainable development.”

  The People's Forum on BRICS, which took place in Goa on October 13-14 in Goa, ahead of the high profile summit meeting Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has urged in a declaration that the BRICS nations should “look at issues of social, economic and environmental justice”, something they have been consistently ignoring.

Undernourished population (%) among BRICS nations An Indian  case study , supplementing the report “2016 Global Hunger Index (GHI)”, which ranks India 97th in GHI among 118 countries, has regretted that “by contrast, Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa, all of whom share the BRICS high table with India, have a single-digit score” in undernourishment.

  While efforts are underway to whip up national sentiment against China for its “support” to terrorists across the borders in Pakistan, facts have come to light suggesting that the boycott calls to ban on products from China, India’s largest trade partner, are unlikely to succeed.

A senior right to information (RTI) activist has revealed that his RTI interventions have showed majority of Government of India ministries and departments are refusing to comply with the rule 10 of the  Rules of Procedure in Regard to Proceedings of the Cabinet, 1987 , which requires them to send a report of the work done every month to the Cabinet Secretariat.

  One of India's topmost conservationists and wildlife experts, Dr MK Ranjitsinh, has said that Phase 1 of the Rs 10,000-crore Ken-Betwa link project – which includes a 230-km canal and a series of barrages and dams linking the rivers – would mean end of the Panna Tiger Reserve of Madhya Pradesh.

A French government-sponsored  report  has said that one of India’s biggest Muslim ghettos, Juhapura in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, is witnessing a unique development: The absence of public infrastructure here has forced affluent Muslims to come up with private initiatives to develop the ghetto, thus privatizing “public action”.

  Criticizing the Uttar Pradesh government for not doing enough to "tackle religious intolerance and violence", even as asking it to "go beyond arrests", Amnesty International India, commenting on the gruesome massacre of Mohd Akhlaq on suspicion of stocking and eating beef, has refused to name any saffron outfit for whipping up tension around the incident.

A manual scavenger cleans up dry toilet in Ahmedabad Amidst Gujarat's business capital, Ahmedabad, all set to be “officially” declared open defecation free (ODF) on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's arrival in the city on October 17 for the World Kabaddi Festival, the Gujarat Safai Kaamdar Adhikar Andolan (GSKAA) has collected 50-odd video footages and hundreds of photographs across the city to call it a bluff. 

  A new  report , jointly prepared by the World Bank and the UNICEF, has estimated that the “children headcount poverty rate in India is 22.1 per cent, as against the Adults headcount poverty rate of 14.3 per cent. Interestingly, the report finds that overall for the entire South Asia, both for children and for adults, is less than that of India.

Medha Patkar, Nitish Kumar Even as well-known social activist Medha Patkar's Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) is running a full-blown anti-liquor campaign in the Narmada valley, eliciting the support of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, at least two of her top supports, both activist-experts, have suggested that there is something fundamentally wrong with the new prohibition fad which has gripped parts of India.

  As India's Right to Information Act (RTI Act) will enter the 12th year of implementation on October 12, a new study by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) has said that “not all Information Commissions come out with their Annual Reports in a timely manner.”

  The World Bank wants India to urgently rework its methodology of estimating poverty, more "compatible" with international estimates, saying if it does so, it “would eventually lead to a substantial downward revision of the poverty numbers in India” – from 21.2 per cent to nearly half of it, about 12.4 per cent, as worked out for the period 2011-12.

In a strongly-worded commentary in a top defence journal, a Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) thinktank consultant has said that the Uri terrorist attack, in which 18 Indian soldiers were martyred, shows “it needs little intuition or professional knowledge to conclude that there were serious lapses in following Standard Operating Procedures.”

The World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) latest  report  may have found that India has “climbed” its score to the 39th position in Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) among 138 countries, a whopping 16-place improvement in a year, thanks to what it calls “goods market efficiency, business sophistication, and innovation.”