Feature Article

The World Bank's press release on May 20 on the launch of the Commission on Growth and Development's report quoted the Commission's chairperson, Mike Spence as saying that the report "kills off once and for all the misguided notion that you can lift people out of poverty in the absence of growth". One might suppose that the report analyses the links between growth and poverty. It does not. (Comment)

The Hokkaido communique on climate change of the Group of Eight countries does not lay down targets for emissions reductions in the developed countries. Yet the G-8 asks developing countries to take more meaningful mitigation actions. How does India

Despite the overwhelming evidence of "immiserisation' due to displacement, numerous cases of resistance and the distortion of democratic processes, the neoliberal paradigm remains dominant in India.

Indian policymakers are fascinated by Shanghai and they seek to develop Mumbai into another Shanghai. This vision is based entirely on the fascination with the Shanghai/Pudong skyline, without any substantive understanding of or facts about the growth in the Chinese city. True, there has been rapid growth in Shanghai, but most of this growth has been to the benefit of corporations (public sector and foreign controlled), little has gone to the city's households. Since the late 1990s, the poor of Shanghai have in fact seen a relative decline in incomes vis-

The Hokkaido communique on climate change of the Group of Eight countries does not lay down targets for emissions reductions in the developed countries. Yet the G-8 asks developing countries to take more meaningful mitigation actions. How does India's new national action plan propose to deal with climate change and how is it different from the approach being suggested by the G-8?

The World Trade Organisation will meet next week to hammer out an agreement on the modalities in agricultural and industrial goods issues of the Doha round. Strangely, in what was supposed to be a balanced development round, the focus will be solely on these two areas even as the rest of the agenda has been kept out. The draft agreements are also skewed (once more) in favour of the advanced economies. India, in particular, will gain very little and lose considerably if it agrees to the proposals on the table. Why then has India gone along so far with the US and WTO demands?

The burning of biomass fuels results in exposure to high levels of indoor air pollution, with consequent health effects. Possible interventions to reduce the exposure include changing cooking practices and introduction of smoke-free stoves supported by health education. Social, cultural and financial constraints are major challenges to implementation and success of interventions.

Dinitrogen (N2) fixation is widely recognized as an important process in controlling ecosystem responses to global environmental change, both today and in the past; however, significant discrepancies exist between theory and observations of patterns of N2 fixation across major sectors of the land biosphere.

Oceanic anoxic events (OAEs) were episodes of widespread marine anoxia during which large amounts of organic carbon were buried on the ocean floor under oxygen-deficient bottom waters. OAE2, occurring at the Cenomanian/Turonian boundary (about 93.5 Myr ago), is the most widespread and best defined OAE of the mid-Cretaceous.