Urban Air Pollution: Will Delhi Even Out the Odds?

THE short and temporary experiment in Delhi to combat severe air pollution by rationing road-use by personal four-wheeled vehicles on alternate days, corresponding to odd or even numbered dates and license plates, is to end this weekend. The media especially newspapers, who for once have taken good advantage of their greater ability than TV for in-depth coverage, have been full of analysis of whether the odd-even formula has worked or not.

The Trojan Horse of Free Basics

FACEBOOK is running a high profile, misleading campaign, using full page advertisements, blocks of TV time, hoardings, and Facebook itself. This campaign, estimated to cost more than Rs 400 crore, is promoting Facebook's private, proprietary platform called “Free Basics” and calling its opponents as anti-poor. In India, Facebook has tied up with Reliance Telecommunications for offering this platform.

If Cities Have to Breathe, Diesel Cars Need to Go

Bodies such as Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Delhi Science Forum and others have been flagging the issue of air pollution from diesel vehicles for years. They have been pointing out that small particulate matter, particularly below 2.5 micron size (PM 2.5) and Nitrous Oxides (NOx) omissions are much higher for diesel vehicles and these are dangerous to health. Increasingly, health and air quality experts around the world have been concerned with the rise of pollutant levels in towns and cities, particularly from diesel vehicles.

Paris Climate Agreement: US has its Way

After all, the prospect of failure at Paris was too scary and all national governments were under pressure, both international and domestic, to deliver.The Paris Agreement certainly represents a breakthrough in the prevailing stalemate in the sense that it binds more than 195 nations to some commonly agreed and binding framework for a joint struggle against climate change with far-reaching measures to combat the crisis. It is the broadest, officially-backed recognition of the reality of human-induced climate change, and the need for a low-carbon pathway to tackle it.

Capital and the Problem of Global Warming

WHAT holds up an agreement among all nations to deal adequately with the problem of global warming? The scientific evidence is clear that the more humanity emits greenhouse gases the more the globe will warm up with the increase in temperatures being roughly proportional to the total emissions that take place over a given period.

Paris Climate Summit: Contradictions And Moving Goalposts

SO COP 21 (Conference of Parties) is finally here and fingers are crossed all over the world that the summit will deliver a definitive outcome. Problem is that nobody is particularly optimistic about how effective that outcome will be in terms of dealing with the clear, present and immediate danger posed by climate change. At the same time, almost everybody is sure that COP21 will end with some concrete agreement, probably named after Paris much like the Kyoto Protocol that it will replace, that will be greeted with applause and hailed as a success.

Hindutva, Mathematics, Pythagoras and Zero

THE Hindutva brigade have been continuously proclaiming that the Greeks learnt Pythagoras from India. This is what Harsh Vardhan, the BJP science and technology minister, claimed in the Indian Science Congress last year; that “we” discovered the Pythagoras theorem and gave it “magnanimously” to the Greeks. There have also been claims of vedic mathematics, which is sought to be introduced in the schools as advanced mathematics of the vedas.

Vimanas, Rockets, and Tipu Sultan

THE RSS and its camp followers have a strange relationship to imagination. They take the imagination of the mythology, and present it as matter of fact history. When it comes to the scientific imagination – how to create new sciences – they fall back on the sterile claim that we having nothing new to discover, as all of it has been already done by our sages in the past. This is the Batra version of science, available in the Gujarat text books. This view of science is also endorsed by the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Orchestrated Attack on India’s Research System

“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”.

Modi's India: Holy Cows, Unholy People

IN a meeting which I attended recently, a senior retired Air Force officer talked about the protest of the writers as a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape. He was referring to writers returning their awards in protest against Mohammad Akhlaq's lynching in Dadri.Two more incidents with extreme right-wing formations killing Muslim youth in cow related incidents have occurred, even after the furore over Aklaq's death. Panchajanya, the RSS mouthpiece, and the chief minister of Haryana, ML Khattar, both have justified Aklaq's murder.

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