Category: Policy

While the rising cost of food stokes fears of an impending food crisis in Asia, the region is also grappling with another ongoing worry: water scarcity. Both problems are closely related and water scarcity has a direct, and often immediate, effect on both national and global food security. The agricultural sector is the heaviest user of water, on average consuming 70 percent of a country's available water supply to fuel crop production.

In the wake of the nuclear accident at Fukushima, Japan, India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and spokesmen for its nuclear industries rushed to reassure the country's citizens that its nuclear industry was safe. No other country in the world has as much national pride wrapped up in nuclear power than India. Of necessity, India painstakingly built up its nuclear capability, civilian and military, largely on its own. The ambition of India to achieve total energy self-reliance for a rapidly industrializing economy via thorium-fuelled reactors seems on the verge of being realized.

In an unprecedented move, a Pakistani general has proclaimed that most of the targets of US drone attacks in Pakistan’s Pushtun tribal belt are "hardcore militants" and the number of "innocent people being killed is relatively low."

This must be music to the ears of CIA officials who run this program. However, everyone else is surprised because this statement has come at a time when the Raymond Davis controversy has sullied the bilateral relationship.