Around the world, narcotics trafficking has been found to be the most resilient and adaptive crime. In India, too, the pattern of narcotics trade and consumption has broadened into a bewildering kaleidoscope, manifesting itself in heightened organised crime, a narco-terror nexus and an exponential rise in substance abuse. Unravelling the proportions of the narco trade […]
New Delhi: The number of students who committed suicide in India rose by 70% between 2011 and 2021, Moneycontrol reported. Today (September 10) is World Suicide Prevention Day. In India, its observance comes just days after coaching centre hub Kota recorded its highest number of student suicides since 2015 and two Dalit students at IIT Delhi committed suicide within two months. Data […]
New Delhi: A day before the end of summit, G20 members reached a compromise over the language over the Ukraine war, to allow for the release of a joint communique at the end of the summit, with India proposing a new text overnight which has led to a consensus. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that he wanted to convey the “good news” […]
Lately, sanatan dharma has become a rallying point for more than one reason. When the national media was busy with the aftershocks of Udhayanidhi Stalin’s statement of eradicating sanatan dharma, another controversy related to sanatan dharma was raging in Gujarat. The core issue was a mural in a Swaminarayan temple at Salangpur in Saurashtra, in which Hanuman was […]
New Delhi: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) refused the government’s proposal to extract Rs 2-3 lakh crore from its balance sheet in 2018 for pre-election expenditure ahead of Lok Sabha polls in the following year, former central bank deputy governor Viral Acharya said in a new prelude to his book, Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India. According […]
India is rapidly digitising. There are good things and bad, speed-bumps on the way and caveats to be mindful of. The weekly column Terminal focuses on all that is connected and is not – on digital issues, policy, ideas and themes dominating the conversation in India and the world. At the Internet Freedom Foundation’s Annual privacy conference […]
New Delhi: The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) is planning to demolish the city’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (SVP) Stadium, the Ahmedabad Mirror has reported, quoting an unnamed senior leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The SVP stadium is not to be confused with Ahmedabad’s more popular Narendra Modi Stadium, which was formerly known as the Sardar Patel Stadium and colloquially as […]
New Delhi: Union minister for parliamentary affairs Pralhad Joshi on Friday, September 1, said that a committee has been formed to examine the possibility of a system of “One Nation, One Election”, under which simultaneous elections would be held for the Lok Sabha and state assemblies. The idea of simultaneous elections is not new and has […]
New Delhi: Union minister for parliamentary affairs Pralhad Joshi has announced on Thursday (August 31) that a special session of parliament will be held next month from September 18 to 22. In a statement on X (formerly Twitter), Joshi said that the special session will include five days. “Special Session of Parliament (13th Session of 17th […]
The Gujarat government has increased the reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the state’s panchayats and urban local bodies from 10% to 27%. This decision was made based on recommendations of the K.S. Jhaveri Commission, which was formed based on a 2022 Supreme Court order on deciding the level of OBC quotas in Gujarat. […]
New Delhi: Chief Justice of India (CJI) D.Y. Chandrachud, heading the five-Judge Constitution Bench hearing the slew of petitions challenging the reading down of Article 370, on Monday (August 28) observed that Article 35A while giving special rights to permanent residents of J&K denied fundamental rights to others. “Article 35A gave special rights and privileges to […]
New Delhi: In June 2018, the chief of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) at the time made an unusual representation to his boss, the cabinet secretary. The RAW chief’s office had just received a show cause notice from the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for alleged money laundering using a Kolkata based television channel involved in the […]
New Delhi: Former Railway Protection Force (RPF) constable Chetan Singh Chaudhary, who killed his senior and three Muslims on a moving train on July 31, had abused, assaulted, and threatened a 45-year-old Muslim auto driver in Ujjain in 2016, Hindustan Times reported. Singh threatened one Wajid Khan over a span of several months in 2016-17. Khan filed a […]
State prosecutors in Uzbekistan have alleged that distributors of an Indian-manufactured cough syrup that killed 65 children in the country bribed local officials with $33,000 to skip mandatory testing. According to a report in Reuters, this was revealed in court on Wednesday (August 16). The number of deaths linked to the cough syrup cited by the […]
In an interview with Karan Thapar, former RBI governor general Raghuram Rajan points out flaws in the Union government’s claim that India has become a mobile phone exporter after the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme was introduced. Apart from questioning the numbers about net exports, Rajan also asks if the government’s assumption that low-skill manufacturing […]
New Delhi: India’s COVID-19 death toll is almost 10 times its official tally, and the country is estimated to have had the highest number of COVID-19 deaths until December 2021 – 4.7 million. This is one of the conclusions of the much-anticipated WHO report on the world’s COVID-19 excess death estimates. Of its 4.7 million deaths, 0.83 million […]
Once captured by the ubiquitous social media lens and flashed everywhere, the evil that men do lives after them. In 2017, Shambhulal Regar etched his name into social media’s “most watched” list by hacking to death and then setting on fire Afrazul Khan, a migrant labourer, for the unpardonable crime of being Muslim, even as […]
New Delhi: August 11 marks 100 days since ethnic violence broke out in Manipur – and 100 days since the state government first shut down the internet. The high court has ordered a “partial restoration” of internet services – but, as experts have pointed out, that partial restoration meets the needs only of a very small […]
– Prem Shankar Jha Nine years into Narendra Modi’s reign as prime minister, one cannot but admire the consummate skill with which he has turned silence and enigma into his most effective political weapon. INDIA, the newly formed opposition coalition, has roundly condemned the BJP’s failure to prevent the civil war that is now raging […]
New Delhi/ Kochi: Nirva, the last African cheetah in the wild in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park, is still at large. Authorities have not been able to locate and dart her despite searching for more than a week now. Some cheetahs in Kuno died due to maggot infections and authorities have been subjecting all the remaining […]