Archives: Journal Articles

This special issue brings together leading experts from Asia, Europe and North America to examine the international institutions, national governance mechanisms and financing systems that together will determine the future of the energy sector. The enormous environmental externalities imposed by fossil fuel extraction and consumption, the devastating corruption and human rights abuses that have accompanied this energy system, and the geopolitical vulnerabilities that have arisen because of the uneven natural distribution of these resources, have occasioned enormous handwringing – but not, yet, a shift to a more rational system of providing energy services. Although national governments play the dominant role in energy governance, these challenges are beyond the scope of any single national government to manage, making energy policy a key component of global governance and international relations.

Constitution benches have been vital for Supreme Court jurisprudence. But, the number of these benches has fallen since the 1960s. This article examines all constitution benches from independence until the end of 2009. Using this analysis, which paints a far more textured picture of these benches than has previously been available, it makes recommendations to help strengthen the Supreme Court’s constitution benches.

Abstract: With foreign corporations setting up nuclear reactors in India and the increasing likelihood of greater foreign direct investment in the nuclear energy sector, the threat of foreign investor claims against India’s nuclear-related policies is a real one. For instance, Russia’s most recent attempt to seek liability waiver under the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010 could unravel a string of problems for India if viewed from an investment lens, thus making it crucial to assess the implications of India’s investment treaties for its nuclear law and policy. This paper aims to provide an understanding of the opportunities and pitfalls that India’s investment treaties present for its domestic nuclear-related policies and regulatory action. In doing so, the paper will analyze the core principles of international investment law and policy and the latest case developments, which includes 2011’s controversial Vattenfall arbitration against Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear energy, the first known nuclear-related investor-state arbitration. This paper makes the first attempt to outline why India’s present position on nuclear liability leaves it vulnerable to investor challenge under its various investment treaty commitments.

The interlinking of rivers (ILR) project is in the news again. The Union Minister for Water Resources, Uma Bharti, is reported to have said that the execution of the project would be accelerated. The project is a highly controversial one, and there are strong bodies of opinion both for and against it. This article will set forth the considerations that have been urged against the project.

A recurrent theme in the post-mortem of the latest Mumbai terror attacks was the ostensible failure of intelligence. The intelligence agencies sought to fend off these accusations by a series of leaks to the press. The agencies had apparently issued a stream of warnings in the months preceding the attacks: the latest one being given as late as 18 November 2008. The Union home minister has stated that there had been problems of coordination between the numerous agencies and their subsidiaries, and that the government had ‘closed these gaps’.

Laws and policies guiding agricultural management have changed considerably over the past couple of decades. The basic aim has remained the alleviation of food insecurity but the conceptual and legal framework within which this is achieved has been comprehensively modified. While the international legal and policy framework proposed in the 1980s emphasised the free availability and transfer of germplasm, today, the emphasis is on appropriation through sovereign rights and intellectual property rights. Existing legal instruments consider in some detail the rights of states, commercial plant breeders and biotechnologists. They, however, do not give much consideration to the rights of farmers even though their tremendous role in agricultural management is recognised. This article addresses this specific aspect and examines ways in which developing countries can rebalance the law and policy framework by introducing legal protection to recognise and promote farmers’ contribution to food security and sustainable agricultural management. The starting point for this enquiry is the TRIPS Agreement but this article also explores other avenues for sui generis protection which takes into account other relevant treaties in the field.

In the wake of the disappointing outcome of COP 24/CMA 3.1 in relation to human rights, this article asks whether the Paris Agreement’s preambular recital on human rights is the outer limit of what the regime can countenance, as the text appears to suggest, or whether it is a hook for the gradual mainstreaming and expansion of human rights protections in the climate regime, as many human rights advocates hope. To address this question, the article explores the contest over the manner and extent to which human rights law applies in the climate change regime, as well as the context in which it is set in relation to the evolution of the climate regime from a prescriptive to a facilitative regime. The article concludes that procedural rights and commitments, which leave considerable discretion to states in relation to outcomes, slot neatly into the Paris Agreement’s architecture, and will likely be progressively mainstreamed and expanded. However, a significant expansion of substantive human rights protections in the climate regime will need to await its moment.

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Achieving a truly sustainable energy transition requires progress across multiple dimensions beyond climate change mitigation goals. This article reviews and synthesizes results from disparate strands of literature on the coeffects of mitigation to inform climate policy choices at different governance levels. The literature documents many potential cobenefits of mitigation for nonclimate objectives, such as human health and energy security, but little is known about their overall welfare implications. Integrated model studies highlight that climate policies as part of well-designed policy packages reduce the overall cost of achieving multiple sustainability objectives. The incommensurability and uncertainties around the quantification of coeffects become, however, increasingly pervasive the more the perspective shifts from sectoral and local to economy wide and global, the more objectives are analyzed, and the more the results are expressed in economic rather than nonmonetary terms. Different strings of evidence highlight the role and importance of energy demand reductions for realizing synergies across multiple sustainability objectives.

In this paper, the relationship is assessed between possessing information on, gaining access to and the efficacy of delivery of India’s national rural employment guarantee scheme (NREGA) in three states. The results suggest that the link between information, access and the delivery of the scheme is not straightforward. Information can increase the propensity for the programme to be accessed by those who are not its primary target population, and can enhance efficacy of delivery to such beneficiaries. Lack of information, on the other hand, decreases the ability of citizens, particularly the acutely poor, to benefit from the scheme.