Special economic zones and sit-ins. Mega-projects and marches. Public-private partnerships and pitched battles. Precociously, because they are desperate, state governments are willing to hand land, forest, water over to industry.

Raucously, because they are really desperate, people all over India have begun to use all available means to contest the usually coercive intrusion of the State into their lives, and livelihoods.

Consider, as symptom, the Orissa government

Melody Petersen covered the pharmaceutical beat for The New York Times for four years. In 1997, her investigative reporting won a Gerald Loeb Award, one of the highest honors in business journalism. She is the author of Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (2008).(An interview with Melody Petersen)

Scientific evidence from hundreds of studies over the past 25 years confirms that breastfeeding

Fuel prices have been on the rise since February 1999, but the increase has been most prevalent since May 2003.

The Access to Medicine Foundation, based in Haarlem, the Netherlands, has developed a set of criteria to assess how ethically pharmaceutical companies perform towards developing countries. It will make its ranking available online from 16 June and hopes investors will use it to decide which companies to invest in, while encouraging big pharma to make medicines available to poor people.

This paper looks at how Nike's soccer ball suppliers (previous and current) in Sialkot (Pakistan) fare in relation to the company's code of ethics. While minimum required working conditions are implemented, the criteria for social and environmental compliance are not met with. The multinational's decision to withdraw orders from the previous supplier ostensibly due to allegations of child labour and unauthorised subcontracting hit large sections of the workforce, especially rural, low-skilled and female workers.