As international pressure mounts on India to undertake greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, the government on Monday reviewed the progress on its internal strategy to deal with climate change and discussed the feasibility of an ambitious programme to harness solar energy.

There is a time bomb ticking under the world, but its leaders seem not to be aware of it. This bomb is different from any that war, terrorism and the movies have made us familiar with, because it cannot be defused at the last moment. This one has to be defused as soon as we hear it ticking. Otherwise, the countdown becomes unstoppable. All we can then do is run for shelter.

BARELY 48 hours after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh underplayed the consequences of accepting a global temperature threshold of 2 degrees centigrade, his minister of state for environment Jairam Ramesh conceded that it would present a challenge.