By Dr Gyan Pathak Gross Bank Credit in India has witnessed only a little improvement compared to last year. The latest data release by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) shows that both food and non-food credit deployment grew by only 7 per cent during November 2020- November 2021...
By Jeeval Chadha On December 16, the union government decided to raise the minimum legal age of marriage for women from 18 to 21. Pursuant to this, the Union Cabinet introduced a bill of amendment to the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 in the Indian parliament. It aims...
By Victor Grossman and John Wojcik BERLIN: Political leaders in Germany are using the results of the recent September elections here to build support for the anti-Russia hysteria being pushed now by NATO and the U.S. The armament makers and militarists in Germany are backing the Pentagon’s dangerous push...
By Tom Blackburn Another pandemic-dominated year has ended, and a demoralized and fragmented British socialist left remains embattled, to say the least. A bipartisan establishment backlash has seen a relentless drive to return socialists to the margins of political discussion; one all the more determined because, in 2017, we...
By Nantoo Banerjee India’s External Affairs Ministry may disagree, but the country’s attempt to make its presence felt in Central Asia has come rather too late. The initiative should have started three decades ago. India could probably rope in Russia to launch a joint trade and economic cooperation programme...
By Dr. Gyan Pathak Successive surveys, month after month, have been recording sharp fall in BJP’s political fortune, and also a miraculous rise of Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh, especially since September 2021. The steep slide of the BJP led by Yogi Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh has necessitated...
By Sushil Kutty The greetings and the good wishes have piled up at the entrance alongside dire predictions. Among the second lot are those which are related to the coronavirus. The coronavirus morphed several times and its latest variant Omicron is mildly severe compared to the horrendous Delta and...
By Arun Srivastava In its desperation to prove secularism irrelevant and worthless the rightist forces. BJP and RSS, are creating a Frankenstein monster by making the police into an arrogant force that turns democratic institutions into a ramshackle. The saffron outfits are trying to depict secularism as fragile...
By James M Dorsey Qatar has begun to cleanse its schoolbooks of supremacist, racist or derogatory references as well as celebrations of violent jihad and martyrdom, according to a recently released study. The revision of textbooks in the final year leading up to Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World...
By Harihar Swarup As the year draws to an end, one can risk a little speculation about what we can expect from politics in India in 2022. As its national government crosses the mid-term point, BJP will fight the opposition in seven state elections. Uttar Pradesh, of course, will...
By K Raveendran Fancying on Prime Minister Modi’s ‘One nation-One poll’ idea, the Reserve Bank of India has launched the ‘One nation-One ombudsman’ programme. But unlike Modi’s poll plan, which could change the very nature and structure of democracy and governance in India, the reason for which it is...
By Sushil Kutty Akhilesh Yadav did an Aurangzeb on his father Mulayam Singh Yadav and grabbed the strings of the Samajwadi Party, which the father couldn’t thwart out of maybe filial reasons. But Mulayam’s younger sibling Shivpal Yadav could not stomach the usurpation and uncle and nephew broke ties—Shivpal...
By Arjavi Indraneesh Omicron has put a spoke in the plan by companies to switch back to normal office work. As the new variant threatens to unleash a ‘Covid tsunami’, as forecast by the World Health Organisation, several companies have already delayed the switch back and asked their staff...
By Prabir Purkayastha The current crisis in Europe of spiralling gas prices, coupled with a cold snap, brings out that the transition of any part of the world to green energy is not going to be easy. It also brings out the complexity in such a transition, that energy...
By Arun Kumar Shrivastav Anti-apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away on December 26 at 90. “He was ready. He went to meet his God, ready and willing,” said his 61-year-old daughter Naomi Nontombi in a tribute to her father. As a bishop of Johannesburg (1985-86) and Archbishop of...
By Kalyani Shankar What does the crystal ball say about the year 2022? As we enter the new year, it is time to look ahead and gaze at the future. Of course, much can happen, which is unexpected and unknown. The year will be one of the multiple pivots:...
By Arjavi Indraneesh The Covid-19 pandemic has marked the end of an era for Southeast Asia’s combined oil and gas production, pushing the region’s output in 2021 to below 5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd) for the first time since 1998, a threshold that is not...
By Dr. Gyan Pathak Wuhan Municipal Health Commission China had reported a cluster of cases and the novel coronavirus COVID-19 was eventually identified on December 31, 2019. It soon swept across the world, pushing health systems to the brink, necessitating lockdowns, with great loss of life and livelihoods. The...