By Pradeep Kapoor LUCKNOW: The successful launch of Mission 2027 by the Samajwadi Party assembly election campaign at a massive rally at Dadri on Sunday boosted the morale of leaders and workers in Western UP, considered to be stronghold of ruling BJP. The selection of the venue at Dadri...
By T N Ashok The glass towers of Bandra-Kurla Complex gleam with the sterile promise of a modern economy, but their foundations rest on a history of spectacular wreckage. For seven decades, thirteen Indian Prime Ministers—from the socialist idealism of Jawaharlal Nehru to the digital muscularity of Narendra Modi—have...
By Tirthankar Mitra Think of an actor equally at home on stage and screen, and Utpal Dutt whose birth anniversary was on March 29, comes to mind first. With an English accent which would have made even an Englishman envious, coupled with mannerisms to match, Dutt would have been...
By Asad Mirza More than 3,000 ‘No Kings’ protests against the Trump administration were held across America and in more than a dozen countries on Saturday (March 27), according to a coalition of organisers that included “anti-authoritarian” groups – Indivisible and 50501, labour unions and other grassroots organisations. Saturday,...
By K Raveendran US President Donald Trump’s attempt to jawbone oil lower has run into the hard edge of market reality. At the start, the strategy appeared to work. When he signalled that peace talks with Iran were possible and suggested a diplomatic opening, crude quickly gave back a...
By R. Suryamurthy Strip away the political theatre around fuel price relief, and what emerges is not a story of benevolence, but of a fiscal system stretched to its limits — and increasingly out of balance. India’s latest excise duty cuts on petrol and diesel are not just a...
By Dr. Gyan Pathak AI-Driven automation could close off many pathways to decent work, including clerical and administrative positions, particularly for women and young workers, which historically represent relatively higher-quality jobs in lower-income countries. Not only that, the disruption by Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in developing economies may materialize...
By P. Sreekumaran THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) is making a desperate attempt to dictate the political discourse in the run-up to the crucial Assembly elections. It is not difficult to understand why the UDF is doing that. All its earlier efforts to push the CPI(M)-headed Left...
By Jag Mohan Thaken The tragic incident of suicide by two farmer brothers of Punjab on 23rd March, 2026 by jumping in front of a moving train has not only left behind a devastated family —their wives, two young daughters aged 8 and 10, and elderly parents with diminished...
By Tirthankar Mitra There is a shift in climate crisis. It is not a headline temperature spike or a heatwave. The earth is now consistently absorbing more energy than it releases. The growing imbalance is a structural break in the planet’s physical equilibrium which is driven by human activity....
By Arun Srivastava The Naxalite movement, originating from a 1967 peasant uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal, has witnessed numerous “twists and turns,” evolving from a localized armed insurrection into a fragmented insurgency and, in recent years, a shrinking threat experiencing mass surrenders and gruesome killings of cadres by the...
By Dr. Gyan Pathak The data show that subsidies and transfers by the central government increased after the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, peaking in 2022-23 at about 2.7 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), and then declining to 1.7 per cent of GDP by 2024-25. However, such expenditures...
By R. Suryamurthy India’s trade negotiators have, over the past decade, begun to speak a new language—one that acknowledges women not merely as beneficiaries of growth, but as agents within it. Yet, as the fine print of the country’s recent free trade agreements (FTAs) reveals, this rhetorical shift has...
By Pradeep Kapoor LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party national president Akhilesh Yadav wants to revive the magic of bandit queen Phoolan Devi by making her sister Meenakshi Nishad as state president of the women wing of the party. It would be worth mentioning here that Nishad community belongs to OBCs and...
By Prabhat Patnaik Most Asian currencies have fallen significantly against the US dollar since the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran. Of these however the Indian rupee has been perhaps the worst performer, having fallen to as low as Rs. 93.73 by Friday March 20, from Rs. 91.01...
By T N Ashok In Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, there is a café where coffee is excellent. The altitude is 10,000 feet. And beneath your chair, under riveted steel plates that once shook with the boots of soldiers retreating in the bitter winter of 1962, a stream murmurs through...
By Tirthankar Mitra KOLKATA: West Bengal unit of BJP is yet to get its act together even as Assembly elections are inching forward in West Bengal. The wraps over an unwieldy organisation in the state came off before the party’s national president, Nitin Nabin when he was in Kolkata...
By Pablo Castaño PARIS: Nearly all parties celebrated the results of France’s municipal elections, held on March 15 and 22. Above all, the contests confirmed just how muddled the country’s political situation is ahead of the 2027 presidential elections. The conservative party Les Républicains (LR) will govern the most...