Despite the overwhelming evidence of "immiserisation' due to displacement, numerous cases of resistance and the distortion of democratic processes, the neoliberal paradigm remains dominant in India.

Indian policymakers are fascinated by Shanghai and they seek to develop Mumbai into another Shanghai. This vision is based entirely on the fascination with the Shanghai/Pudong skyline, without any substantive understanding of or facts about the growth in the Chinese city. True, there has been rapid growth in Shanghai, but most of this growth has been to the benefit of corporations (public sector and foreign controlled), little has gone to the city's households. Since the late 1990s, the poor of Shanghai have in fact seen a relative decline in incomes vis-

The Hokkaido communique on climate change of the Group of Eight countries does not lay down targets for emissions reductions in the developed countries. Yet the G-8 asks developing countries to take more meaningful mitigation actions. How does India's new national action plan propose to deal with climate change and how is it different from the approach being suggested by the G-8?

The World Trade Organisation will meet next week to hammer out an agreement on the modalities in agricultural and industrial goods issues of the Doha round. Strangely, in what was supposed to be a balanced development round, the focus will be solely on these two areas even as the rest of the agenda has been kept out. The draft agreements are also skewed (once more) in favour of the advanced economies. India, in particular, will gain very little and lose considerably if it agrees to the proposals on the table. Why then has India gone along so far with the US and WTO demands?

The Ranbaxy sale to Daiichi Sankyo could herald a new phase in the evolution of the Indain pharmaceutical industry. In order to cope in a world after the agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights came into force, some of the larger Indian firms pursued the two strategies of a greater internationalisation of sales of generic drugs and a focus on research and development as junior partners of global giants. Ranbaxy had mixed success with the two strategies.

The paper examines the basic reasons and feasible remedies for organisational weakness in India's public transport systems and the possible contribution of ownership, industry and management structure, leadership, social norms, and institutional incentives to alleviating the weaknesses. The arguments are illustrated with reference to the public rail and air services and help to understand why some public sector transport undertakings have performed better than others. The most effective changes are those that create incentives, broadly defined, for individuals to improve productivity.

Any understanding of global warming must consider the relative contribution to the problem by the richer countries and the rich, over the poorer countries and the poor who are the most affected due to the problem. The legal regime adopted to solve the issue should place the poor and human rights in the centre stage of a new entitlement-based strategy to address the issue. This framework would then involve the development of technology reducing greenhouse emissions in the richer countries and the transfer of the same to the poorer ones.

The redevelopment and beautification of the capital for the making of a "world-class city' have entailed a heavy cost in terms of slum demolitions. A survey documenting the change of land use that has taken place on the sites of demolished slum clusters highlights the emerging processes and trends. Some of its findings question the stated principle of the Delhi slum policy, namely, the removal and relocation of squatter settlements only when the land is required to implement projects in the "larger public interest'.

The National Action Plan on Climate Change is only half a beginning that is neither fully vision nor plan. (Editorial)

There is a paradigm shift in the agricultural research and development policy of developing countries, primarily driven by scarcity of public funds. The countries with a strong research system like India and China have initiated a number of reforms with an objective to diversify the sources of funding and increase research efficiency. Competitive funding, commercialisation of technologies, strengthened intellectual property rights, facilitating regulations and flexible extension approach are some of the major reforms undertaken.