planning & policy Archives - Page 24 of 24

"The Logic of Neo-Liberalism"

John Ledger

Bookshelf

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

18th April 2016

George Monbiot writes: So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom recognise it as an ideology. We accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power….

Bookshelf

Cars, Capitalism and India

12th April 2016

Vidhyadhar Date writes: A developed country is not one where the poor drive cars, but one where the rich use public transport. Building more roads to reduce congestion is like trying to put out a fire with petrol. India has failed to learn from developed countries’ mistakes and is on a disastrous path of motorization….

Frans Lanting

Conflict/Dispossession

An infrastructure tsunami is being unleashed on the environment in the name of ‘development’

9th April 2016

Bill Laurance writes: Some 25 million km of new paved roads, thousands of dams, and hundreds of thousands of new mining, oil and gas projects, are being planned, roughly 90% of them in developing nations. Their environmental impacts could easily dwarf climate change as thousands of projects penetrate into the world’s last surviving wild areas….

INDIA

Why we must have water budgets

30th March 2016

Techno-economic fixes do not address the underlying “zero-sum game” nature of water resource use. Ultimately, the problem is that of allocating the water available each year among users — both people and the ecosystem. Without understanding how much water is available, how much is used and by whom, solving India’s water crisis will be impossible….

Elanthemag.com

Bookshelf

Bookshelf: When trucks stop running, so does civilization

23rd March 2016

Virtually everything in our homes, everything in our stores, got there on a truck. Prior to that, 90 percent of those items were transported on a ship and/or a train. If trucks, trains, and ships stopped running, our global economy and way of life would stop too. Alice Friedemann’s new book examines precisely this prospect….

Development/Growth

How did Indian rivers fare in 2015?

19th March 2016

Swati Bansal writes: The waters of many rivers were declared as unfit for human consumption. This included rivers in Goa with fecal coliform bacteria, and rivers in Karnataka where none were suitable for drinking. But pollution was just one factor, the other was hydropower power projects which continue to choke rivers such as the Chenab….

Development/Growth

Video & Report: Is India’s 100 smart cities project a recipe for social apartheid?

9th March 2016

Shruti Ravindran reports: In a monograph for a conference on smart cities, the economist and consultant Laveesh Bhandari described smart cities as “special enclaves” that would use prohibitive prices and harsh policing to exclude “millions of poor Indians… For if we do not keep them out, they will override our ability to maintain such infrastructure.”…

Shanker Chakravarty/The Hindu

Development/Growth

Make (Or Break) In India: Down to Earth special issue ahead of the Union Budget

28th February 2016

The Union Budget 2015-2016 will be presented in amid dwindling fortunes of the NDA government. Agriculture is already on a downswing while the economic slowdown is perceptible – all this when nine states are going to polls in 2016-17. Down to Earth presents a series of analyses of the Union Budget from the environment and development perspectives….

CLIMATE CRISIS

News update

20th October 2015

‘Capitalism is Mother Earth’s Cancer’: World People’s Summit Issues 12 Demands Common Dreams Decrying capitalism as a “threat to life,” an estimated 7,000 environmentalists, farmers, and Indigenous activists from 40 countries convened in the Bolivian town of Tiquipaya for this weekend’s World People’s Conference on Climate Change, aiming to elevate the demands of social movements…

ALTERNATIVES

Growth, green growth or degrowth? New critical directions for India’s sustainability

14th August 2014

This is the concept note for the first ever symposium on ‘de-growth’ in India, held in September 2014 in Delhi. Rajeswari S. Raina (NISTADS-CSIR) & Julien-Francois Gerber (TERI University) It has become common knowledge that GDP is a simplistic and even misleading measure for an economy’s health*. In fact, two-digit GDP growth is in many…

ALTERNATIVES

Peak Oil, dying cities and cities of tomorrow

10th October 2013

By T. Vijayendra Peak oil means when the production of petroleum products has reached a peak and hence forth it will only fall. This has already happened. It heralds the collapse of industrial societies. Cities are energy consumers, not producers. With the fossil fuel era coming to a close, and no viable alternative energy source…

CLIMATE CRISIS

Traffic in the era of climate change

Senior Indian journalist Vidyadhar Date’s book Traffic In the Era of Climate Change was released in 2012.Given Date’s incisive work as a journalist, the book will be a major milestone in the debate on formulation of urban policy and the regulating the use and abuse of personal vehicles. Introducing the book on his Facebook post, Date writes, “I am…