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The common perception is that high or growing litigation rates in a country are a sign of societal pathology. Studies of litigation rates, however, consistently report that lawsuit filings per capita increase with economic prosperity, thus suggesting that litigation rates are a natural consequence of prosperity and not necessarily evidence of an overly litigious populace. India’s substantial interstate variation in litigation rates and in economic and noneconomic measures of well-being provide an opportunity to evaluate the relation between well-being and litigation rates. Using many years of data on civil filings in India’s lower courts and High Courts, we present evidence that more prosperous states have higher civil litigation rates. We also report the first evidence that accounting for noneconomic well-being, as measured by the education and life expectancy components of the Human Development Index, explains litigation rate patterns better than explanations using a more purely economic measure of well-being, GDP per capita. Despite India’s continuing economic growth, we present data that indicates India’s enormous and growing civil case backlog has discouraged civil case filings in recent years. These findings raise the question whether India’s future economic growth will be compromised if courts at all levels, particularly lower courts, are not able to more quickly resolve disputes.

Jacqueline Peel and Jolene Lin’s informative assessment of climate litigation in the Global South is a vital and timely contribution to the growing literature on the issue. It relies on a definition of climate litigation that allows the authors to draw on a much larger set of cases from the Global South by including cases in which climate concerns are “at the periphery.” This essay examines climate litigation in India. Although the term “global warming” started appearing in Indian environmental judgments in the 1990s, climate litigation in India is of relatively recent provenance, and with a few exceptions, climate concerns are peripheral to other, more mainstream environmental issues. Peel and Lin analyze five Indian cases as part of their Global South docket; I expand this set by including fourteen more cases that I believe fit their article’s chosen definitional ambit. I classify these cases into four categories based on the use of climate language—reference to climate change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, or the international negotiations—in the courts’ judgment. Drawing from case law analysis and Indian environmental litigation, I make observations about what we can interpret from the current set of climate cases, and I predict that while conditions are favorable for climate litigation in India to grow, in the near future climate claims are likely to remain peripheral issues.

This article is divided into four main sections. The first section introduces the process currently under way under the Biosafety Protocol towards the adoption of a liability and redress regime as well as some of the issues that member states need to address in this context. The second section moves on to highlight some of the substantive issues that need to be addressed in the development of a liability and redress regime in the field of modern biotechnology. These include the question of environmental damage, a central concern in an environmental treaty, as well as other equally important issues such as risks to human health, socio-economic aspects and the question of patent liability. The third section analyses existing legal frameworks to highlight some rules and principles that current negotiations on liability in the context of the Biosafety Protocol can use as models. It examines international environmental civil liability regimes whose general structure provides an appropriate starting point for liability and redress in biotechnology. It then analyses some existing liability regimes in the field of biotechnology which provide more specific pointers for the development of a biotechnology-related liability regime. The last section examines some of the points that need to be addressed in the context of the ongoing development of a liability and redress regime under the Biosafety Protocol. These include a number of elements within the environmental liability regime which need to be adapted to the field of biotechnology as well as issues concerning the link between environmental liability and patent liability, an issue of increasing importance at the national and international levels.

Looking at India’s urban planning policy framework, there emerges the difficulty of arriving at reconciliation between the desire to develop world class cities and the need to conserve and restore cities as spaces where heritage, both intangible and built, is intertwined with the functional city. The question whether the slew of Five Year Missions devised by the Ministry of Urban Development, such as the Swachh Bharat Mission, Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, have been able to achieve this reconciliation has been explored here. Out of these, two such schemes, Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana have been taken up to investigate the question – where and how does the issue of heritage get addressed in the intent, content and governance of the two national schemes.

Standardized patients (SPs) are people who are recruited locally, trained to make identical scripted clinical presentations, deployed incognito to multiple different health care providers, and debriefed using a structured reporting instrument. The use of SPs has increased dramatically as a method for assessing quality of TB care since it was first validated and used for tuberculosis in 2015. This paper summarizes common findings using 3,086 SP-provider interactions involving tuberculosis across various sampling strata in published studies from India, China, South Africa and Kenya. It then discusses the lessons learned from implementing standardized patients in these diverse settings. First, quality is low: relatively few SPs presenting to a health care provider for the first time were given an appropriate diagnostic test, and most were given unnecessary or inappropriate medication. Second, care takes a wide variety of forms – SPs did not generally receive “wait and see” or “symptomatic” care from providers, but they received a medley of care patterns that included broad-spectrum antibiotics as well as contraindicated quinolone antibiotics and steroids. Third, there is a wide range of estimated quality in each observed sampling stratum: more-qualified providers and higher-level facilities performed better than others in all settings, but in every stratum there were both high- and low-quality providers. Evidence from SP studies paired with medical vignettes has shown that providers of all knowledge levels significantly underperform their demonstrated ability with real patients. Finally, providers showed little response to differences in patient identity, but showed strong responses to differences in case presentation that give some clues as to the reasons for these behaviors.

MUCH of higher education is now seen as instrumental – as training rather than preparation. The focus is more on learning to work rather than learning to learn. It is argued that the ‘escalation of economic globalization has driven a demand for instrumental education – that which can be clearly tied to the goals of production, productivity and employment’ and that ‘academic majors and programmes that directly affect the economy…are increasingly elevated over other fields of study.’ India seems, at first glance, to exemplify this trend quite robustly, with a sharp rise in the number of professional education institutions in disciplines such as engineering, medicine, nursing, and so on, mostly in the private sector, specialized ‘deemed to be universities’, and the growth of self-financing courses in our universities.

FOR the leaders of the Indian independence struggle, the adoption of a Constitution constituting a sovereign democratic republic was the first important step in marking a break from the past of colonial domination and subordination. However, in addition to the desire to control their destiny, the Indian independence movement was also driven by the desire to achieve a new social and economic order premised on rapid economic development and social redistribution.

The question before the Constituent Assembly was how to ensure the transition to a liberal democratic legal order which guaranteed rights to liberty, equality and property, while simultaneously embarking on a transformation of the economic and social order considered by Nehru as imperative to prevent a revolution. This transformation was pegged on a development strategy involving a move from a feudal agrarian to a capital intensive industrial society. A major component of this transformative agenda was land reform, involvingzamindari abolition and redistribution of land amongst the peasants. Equally important, however, was state planned industrial growth and encouragement of growth of private industry.

Charged with the task of balancing the interests of the individual with those of the community, the Constituent Assembly debated both the inclusion and content of a fundamental right to property for two and a half years before adopting Articles 19(1)(f) and 31. Article 19(1)(f) guaranteed to all citizens the fundamental right to ‘acquire, hold and dispose of property.’ Article 19(6) made the right subject to ‘reasonable restrictions in the public interest’ by the federal and state legislatures. Moreover, Article 31 of the Constitution provided that any state acquisition of property must only be upon enactment of a valid law, for a public purpose and upon payment of compensation. This provision was taken almost verbatim from Section 299 of the Government of India Act, 1935 with exceptions for certain zamindari abolition laws. The paradox implicit in guaranteeing a fundamental right to property, while simultaneously embarking on a socialist developmental project of land reform and state planned industrial growth, predictably resulted in tensions between the legislature and the executive on the one hand, that sought to implement this development agenda, and the judiciary on the other, which enforced the fundamental right to property of those affected.

Article 31 codified what is often described in political and legal parlance as the ‘eminent domain’ power of the state. This power inherent in the exercise of a state’s sovereignty allows the state to compulsorily acquire property belonging to private persons for a public purpose upon payment of just compensation. The twin requirements of public purpose and just compensation are based on the rationale that no individual should have to disproportionately bear the burden of supporting the public good. ‘Acquisition and requisitioning of property’ was included as a subject in the Concurrent List enabling both Parliament and the state legislatures to enact laws on the subject.

The negotiations launched in Durban in 2011 were tasked with designing by the 2015 Paris conference an international climate agreement for the post-2020 period. The Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) launched a process “to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties”. After two weeks of difficult negotiations between deeply entrenched positions, the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (“COP 21”), held in Paris from November 30 to December 13, 2015, adopted a new treaty called the Paris Agreement. A historic achievement in multilateral diplomacy, the Paris Agreement is a much more ambitious outcome than the negotiations, that had made incremental progress for several years before that, might have lead one to expect. The Agreement sets ambitious global goals, thus providing an ambitious direction of travel to the international climate regime. It creates new obligations for Parties, including detailed obligations of conduct to mitigate climate change. It also establishes a rigorous and compulsory monitoring mechanism. This article provides insights into the context, preparation and organization of COP 21, before analyzing the legal form and content of the new “Paris Agreement”.

Canada – Certain Measures Affecting the Renewable Energy Sector (Canada FIT), appears to be the first-ever case at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to address the tenuous ‘trade versus climate’ debate in the context of renewable energy policies. Feed-in Tariffs (FIT) for renewable energy, which have emerged as a popular domestic policy tool to address climate change, share an extremely controversial relationship with the international trade regime, especially with the legality of such support schemes increasingly coming under the WTO scanner.

In this article, the authors focus on four aspects that emerge from the decisions made by the WTO’s Panel and Appellate Body in this case, namely the clarification of the blurred legal status of renewable energy support schemes under WTO law; a new ‘public goods’ exception; an evolving, “activist” WTO jurisprudence; and the imminent end of domestic content requirements in renewable energy policies. The authors argue in this article that the WTO Panel and Appellate Body’s decisions represent a development of the law, one that is aimed at settling the ever-so-contentious clash between the WTO law on subsidies and climate change support schemes.

The Journal of World Investment & Trade, Volume 15, Issue 1-2, pages 245 – 271.

Urbanisation in India is both a necessary input and an inevitable consequence of growth. However, we must accept that the existing urbanisation models are unsustainable at the Indian scale and there is no available alternative trajectory. The international climate change negotiations can be seen as an opportunity to create an environment that will help in the discovery of a more sustainable urbanisation. This paper explores a limited set of emergent issues that will have to be considered as India develops its domestic approach to urbanisation, while negotiating its international position on climate change. It is structured into three broad sections, viz, (a) the feedback loops from urbanisation to climate change and vice versa, (b) actions needed at multiple levels to influence these processes, and (c) the implications of these for India’s negotiating position on climate change.