The reactor that has now gone critical at Kalpakkam, on the Bay of Bengal coastline in Tamil Nadu, is not the end of that journey. It is, more precisely, the end of the beginning. The real test is whether India can now scale fast breeder capacity rapidly enough to make a material difference to its energy-mix building on the Kalpakkam template, the industrial supply chains it has validated, and the engineering confidence it has earned.
The Indus and the Ganges are dying slowly, and with them disappear species that evolved over thousands of years within these waters. If current patterns continue, future generations may inherit rivers that exist geographically but are biologically empty. South Asia still has an opportunity to reverse this trajectory, but only if environmental protection becomes a shared regional priority rather than an afterthought.
Climate migration isn’t just about the loss of land. It is about the loss of memory, culture and home. When people are driven out of the places where they were born, few things that matter are merely economic. Over the next decades, the world will confront a fundamental dilemma. Can humankind handle the climate crisis in a surer way? Or will the future consist of millions searching for a new place to call home?
The constraint on India’s expansion is fissile inventory, particularly between 2035-2045. At present, the breeder program depends on plutonium from a limited set of eight unsafeguarded reactors. Meanwhile, India has accumulated spent fuel from uranium imported for its safeguarded reactors. This significant plutonium is lying idle because we lack safeguarded reprocessing facilities.
Asked about the causes of the crises, Singer-Hamdy said that while the Ukraine conflict had a ripple effect, there were other factors like the Covid pandemic, the tax cuts that cut the government revenue, the foreign exchange shortage, the currency devaluation and the ban on chemical fertilisers which cut agricultural production by 50 per cent.
Fatima joined her country’s diplomatic service in 1989 and served in various capacities in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in Bangladesh Missions in New York, Kolkata, Geneva and Beijing.
After taking power, the new government of Ranil Wickremesinghe has been reaching out to the international community. The relative political stability that his government has brought following the resignation of the previous government of Mahinda Rajapaksa has also boosted the confidence of the international community.
Singh said, “The tools to address the serious violations of international law need to be used judiciously, without any selectivity, in line with principles of the UN Charter”. He stressed that countries should primarily be responsible for prosecuting serious violations of international law.
During the debate, Pakistan’s Acting Permanent Representative Aamir Khan had accused India of “grave breaches of international criminal law” in Kashmir and of trying to change its demographics from Muslim majority to Hindu majority by cancelling its special constitutional status.
“The growing capabilities of terrorist and other non-State groups to access delivery systems like missiles and unmanned/uncrewed aerial systems [drones] have compounded the risks of terrorism using WMDs”, the Indian representative said.
The report comes amid ongoing peace talks between the TTP and the Pakistan government as the violence has increased since August last year. Earlier attempts of peace talks, mediated by the Afghan Taliban, had failed to produce any significant result. This year alone, the TTP carried out 46 attacks, mostly targeting security forces, and killed 79 people, according to the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies data.
Without naming the two countries, India’s Permanent Representative T. S. Tirumurti told the Council on March 25, “India also believes that there is a pressing need to address the proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies related to DPRK (North Korea) in our region. These linkages have an adverse impact on peace and security in the region, including on India”.
At a press conference in Kabul on Thursday, the UN envoy said that the advancing erasure of women from public life was especially concerning and urged the authorities to immediately reverse policies and directives that negatively impact women and girls.
Bangladesh’s move to respond to the UN group’s queries came almost two months after the US State Department sanctioned seven top serving and retired RAB officials in December last year, citing human rights violations and other abuses by it, a move that was viewed very disapprovingly by Dhaka as an unfriendly act.
For Bangladesh, the challenges of hosting the Rohingyas are only growing amid the resource crunch, a growing rate of crimes, and drug smuggling in the refugee camps.
Nepal is the second largest contributor of uniformed officers to UN Peacekeeping, as over 5,700 of its military and police personnel are deployed to the UN operations in different conflict zones, according to the United Nations.
Recent reports showed how inspectors from the Taliban’s moral policing ministry had now intensified patrolling around public spaces like malls, bazaars, and other places, enforcing their socially conservative codes.
Tirumurti spoke of the dangers from terrorist exploitation of the new financial technologies like virtual currencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that create monetary value out of non-physical entities, crowd-funding platforms and new payment methods like prepaid phone cards, mobile payments and online payment systems
India “has never been found wanting” when it came to helping countries in distress, whether it was the Covid pandemic or conflicts. “We have provided food aid in the form of thousands of metric tonnes of wheat, rice, pulses, and lentils to several countries, including our neighbourhood and Africa, to strengthen their food security”, he said
