Feature Article

Okhla residents accuse BJP and Congress of trying to poison people by promoting waste incineration to generate electricity. The plant is being put through trial runs. Even as candidates contesting municipal seats in the national capital make their rounds of residential colonies to seek votes, citizens and waste-pickers' associations are angered by the election manifesto of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). One of the promises it makes is electricity from waste by setting up incineration plants in various parts of the city.

The India Human Development Report 2011 undertakes a disaggregated analysis of a large set of indicators and is unhesitating in its criticism of our failures in human development outcomes even while recognising that there is empirical evidence of achievement in many dimensions. The main fi ndings of the report point out that the states are converging on important indicators of human functioning and that the indicators among the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and Muslims are converging with the national average.

A large body of work has tried to attribute the remarkable growth of Chinese agriculture between 1979 and 1984 to the dismantling of collectives. This paper critically reviews the evidence and finds that decollectivisation did not contribute to agricultural growth in the early 1980s. In particular, its response to Lin (1992) challenges the consensus and argues that decollectivisation was largely irrelevant to the exceptional growth in this period. It is held that a more intensive application of modern inputs and favourable weather conditions accounted for most of the spurt in growth.

Though much intellectual energy has been expended on the “poverty problem” in India, the debate simply does not take into account the highly unequal social context in which poverty is produced and reproduced. Can we reflect on the right not to be poor without taking on these background inequalities? Arguably, the right not to be poor is best articulated as a subset of the generic right to equality. The concept of equality is, however, not self-explanatory. In many circles, redistributive justice has replaced equality. It is therefore time to ask the question – equality for what?

The compulsory licence issued to Natco for manufacture of the anti-cancer drug Nexavar is a landmark decision on many grounds – the first one in India since the 2005 amendment to the 1970 Patents Act and the fi rst in the world issued to a private party. There are some ambiguities in the order, but the door is now open for issue of CLs for a number of patented drugs that are not being worked.

Orbitally triggered decomposition of soil organic carbon in terrestrial permafrost is suggested as an explanation for a series of sudden and extreme global warming events that occurred about 55 million years ago.

A reconstruction of global surface temperature is used to show that deglacial temperature is correlated with and generally lags carbon dioxide concentration, a result that contributes to the explanation of the temperature change that occurred at the end of the most recent ice age.

A reconstruction of temperature from proxy records shows that the rise in global mean temperature closely resembled, but slightly lagged, the rise in carbon dioxide concentration during the last period of deglaciation.