India has embarked upon what can be called the most ambitious and comprehensive programme of planned urbanisation undertaken anywhere in the world. This development is also a recognition of the fact that by 2030, 600 million Indians, or 40 per cent of India’s population, will live in urban spaces.
India spans a longitudinal difference of 30 degrees from the western state of Gujarat to Arunachal Pradesh in the East. However, India has a single time zone, defined by mean longitude at 82.5 degrees east of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), passing through Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh. This results in almost a two-hour difference in sunrise from east to west.
If it joined the Community, it would no longer be in complete control of its economy. It also feared that its membership of the Community would damage its relationship with the Commonwealth as well as its relations with USA.
The European Commission: It ran the day-to-day work of the Community. It was staffed by civil servants and economists.
Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC): Set up in 1948 as a committee of 16 nations to best use the American Marshall Aid, it was the first initiative towards economic unity.
The individual states were too small and their economies too weak for them to be economically and military viable separately in a world now dominated by the superpowers, the USA and the USSR.
The rupee last week fell to an all-time low of 69.09 against the U.S dollar. The currency has fallen about 7.5% since the beginning of the year, making it the worst-performing currency in Asia.
In ruling that the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi has no independent decision-making power, and has to act mainly on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Court has restored the primary role played by the “representative government” in the National Capital Territory.
Since Independence, the challenges of building a mass higher education system with inadequate government funding has meant poor quality, increasing privatization and politicization. Excellence is possible, as the IITs and IIMs show, although it is limited to a tiny segment of a system that enrolls 35 million students.
The government’s priorities in implementing the National Policy on Biofuel were to find a solution to air pollution, maintain affordable transportation fuel prices, promote clean and sustainable fuels, move towards energy self-sufficiency, and reduce dependence on crude oil imports. Unfortunately, precious little has been done so far.
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