“There will always be circumstances when private investment lags – when the innovation creates a public good, such as clean air, for which an investor can’t capture the value, or when the risk is too high, such as novel approaches to new antibiotic drugs, or when the technical complexity is so high that there is fundamental uncertainty as to the outcome, such as with quantum computing or fusion energy. For these cases, government funding is the only possible source to spur innovation”.

INDIA finally announced its mitigation pledge last week, its so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contribution or INDC for the approaching Climate Summit in Paris in December this year which is expected to conclude an international agreement to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions so as to rein in, and hopefully in time reverse, runaway climate change. India’s INDC has been broadly welcomed including by many civil society groupings.

SOFTWARE patents are like zombies in the zombie film genre that Hollywood has made popular. They just refuse to die. As many times you kill them, they revive again and keep coming back. In India, we thought we had killed and buried software patents with the Amended Patent Act in 2005, and again in the Patents Manual, 2011, both of which effectively deny software patents.

THE CAG draft report on Delhi's Discoms describing the Rs 8,000 crore loot of consumers, follows on the heels of the Orissa Electricity Regulatory Commission's (OERC) order, cancelling the licenses of the three Anil Ambani Reliance distribution companies. OERC cancelled Reliance licenses in March, 2015 for failing to deliver on any count, and repeatedly violating its orders. With this, we have come a full circle on the electricity reforms introduced by the Electricity Act 2003, whose primary goal was to privatise the sector.

WITH much fanfare, US President Barack Obama took to the White House podium to announce, as part of his administration’s action plan on climate change, a new Clean Power Plan aimed at cutting carbon emissions from electricity generation in the US, chiefly from coal-based power plants, by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The Plan, comprising a set of rules proclaimed by the federal Environment Protection Agency (EPA) under the Clean Air Act, seeks to shut down or drastically improve efficiencies of coal-based power stations and promote non fossil-fuel electricity generation.