Feature Article

Australia has a long history of ecological disaster from alien species - so why is ecologist David Bowman proposing adding yet another?

This paper examines the relationship between per capita cereal consumption and per capita income in India using the India Human Development Survey 2004-05. It turns out that per capita cereal consumption remains much the same at different levels of per capita income, though it does vary substantially with education levels, household size, occupation patterns and urbanisation. The recent decline of cereal consumption over time may reflect changes in these non-income factors. While cereal consumption seems unrelated to per capita income, it is positively related to per capita expenditure.

There is not just a crisis of development today, but also a crisis of ideas for emancipatory forms of development. What is needed from progressives is a rigorous theory that must acknowledge what is present (class exploitation, imperialism, national and social oppression, profit-driven ecological destruction, gross commercialisation of all spheres of human life including culture and social relations) but also what is absent (collective democratic control over our lives, our planet, our bodies, our destiny, our culture).

The Common Service Centre scheme aims to establish nearly three lakh rural internet kiosks across India. A recent evaluation study, however, found poor demand among users and delayed roll-out of government-to-consumer services, causing losses and attrition among private operators of the scheme. There is space, therefore, for greater engineering of public good outcomes by tying financial incentives to computer education goals.

The quality of implementation of the National Rural Health Mission in a number of states has transformed the public healthcare system considerably. Learning from these improvements which have focused on the grass roots, local recruitment is the best way to forge a credible public health system that has public accountability.

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state and district levels nor offers any solutions on how to deal with them.

The laws are ineffectual, the facilities are inadequate and hazardous wastes continue to pile up. (Editorial)

Simple models of plant response to warming climates predict vegetation moving to cooler and/or wetter locations: in mountainous regions shifting upslope. However, species-specific responses to climate change are likely to be much more complex. We re-examined a recently reported vegetation shift in the Santa Rosa Mountains, California, to better understand the mechanisms behind the reported shift of a plant distribution upslope.