In Focus by The Hindu

With Punjab just a few months away from assembly polls, former Congressman Captain Amarinder Singh has announced that is launching launching a new party. When the Captain was unceremoniously replaced as Punjab CM by Charanjit Singh Channi in September, people expected that he would make the Congress pay. This week, he made his intentions clear with two statements: that a large number of Punjab Con...

The 26th Conference of parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or CoP 26 as it is popularly called was held a few days ago in Glasgow, Scotland. At the summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India will aim to attain net zero emissions by 2070. He also announced that India will draw 50% of its consumed energy from renewable sources by 2030, and cut its carbon...

After presenting a picture of being on the same page for a considerable length of time, the appointment of a new chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Directorate, created a very public void between Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa. It appears that the appointment of a new chief was as important as the shunting out of the old one, Lt. Gen. Faiz Hamee...

The Reserve Bank of India’s new norms and guidelines for recurring payments came into effect this month. One of them, for instance, lays down that banks should send a pre-debit notification to credit card holders 24 hours before an actual debit is done. There are other requirements as well with regard to the nature and duration of an e-mandate for recurring payments. What all this means is that, f...

German luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz has started a new model of retail in India – what it calls ‘Retail of the Future (ROTF), under which it is now selling its cars directly to customers. Traditionally, a car-maker would sell cars to a dealer, and the dealer would then sell the car to the customer. Customers had the option of visiting different dealerships, comparing prices, and pitting one dealer...

The new anti-viral drug brought out by Merck Pharmaceuticals, Molnupiravir, seems to be a promising development in the global fight against COVID-19. Early results from the phase-3 trial of the drug report that it halves the chances of hospitalisation in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19. It is also an oral medication -- it can be taken in pill form, unlike other anti-viral drugs that have t...

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court N.V. Ramana recently spoke of the need to ‘Indianise’ the justice system. He said that there were a lot of practices that have been carried over from the colonial period – including language practices, and lengthy, often technical judgments – that alienate the common man from the judiciary. He stressed that the justice system needs to minimise procedural barriers...

The world's first malaria vaccine is here. The World Health Organisation, earlier this month, endorsed RTS,S/AS01 or Mosquirix, developed by British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline in partnership with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative. The vaccine, which acts against P. falciparum, believed to be most deadly malaria parasite globally, took nearly 30 years to make. Malaria is an ancient disease -- it h...

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2021, published last week by Concern Worldwide, an Irish aid agency, and Welt Hunger Hilfe, a German non-profit, has ranked India at 101 out of 116 countries, in its assessment of how successful countries have been in combating hunger. Only 15 countries – many of them marked by violent strife – have performed worse than India. The government of India has been quick to...

On October 8, the Centre announced that the struggling State airline, Air India, was being sold to the Tata group for Rs. 2,700 crore in cash and Rs. 15,300 crore in debt. Some analysts believe that the sale of Air India provides a major fillip to India’s privatisation programme. Will the Tatas be able to turn around Air India, especially when they have invested heavily in Vistara and Air Asia Ind...

Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s assertion that she is a full-time, hands-on chief executive at the party’s working committee meeting should silence the critics of the Gandhi family for the moment. She also asked dissidents to speak to her directly and not through the media. Will these unusually assertive comments after months of silence from Sonia Gandhi galvanise the party ahead of crucial elec...

Earlier this week, on Thursday, Japan’s new Prime Minister Fumio Kishida dissolved the lower house of Parliament, paving the way for general elections, which are scheduled for October 31. Japanese politics has been dominated by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for much of its post-war history. Under Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest serving Prime Minister who stepped down in September 202...

With about 29% of India’s population fully vaccinated, the government’s Subject Expert Committee (SEC) has now recommended Bharat Biotech’s COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, for Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) for children aged 2-18 years. This is the second vaccine in India to be cleared for children. Earlier, Zydus Cadilla’s vaccine got authorization for kids above 12. While the timeline for the supp...

Virat Kohli has announced that he will step down from T20 captaincy of the Indian team after the T20 World Cup in November. He is also stepping down as captain of Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) after IPL 2021. Both the nature and the timing of these decisions have raised a lot of questions. For instance, wouldn’t it have been better to make these announcements after the T20 World Cup, or after...

A Kashmiri Pandit chemist Mohan Lal Bindroo, a Sikh school principal Supinder Kaur and her Hindu colleague from Jammu have been killed in targeted attacks in Srinagar recently. A large number of Muslims too have been killed in such attacks, laid at the door of The Resistance Front, widely believed to be a front of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Many Hindus who stayed back after the exodus of Kashmiri Pandit...

As early as this month, India may see the rollout of ZyCoV-D, the world's first DNA vaccine against COVID-19. Pharmaceutical company Zydus Cadila has received Emergency Use Authorisation for this vaccine, which is also the first in the country to be approved for children above the age of 12. How do DNA vaccines work, and how are they different from the vaccines we have now -- Covishield and Covaxi...

With four farmers being run over by SUVs that were part of a convoy of vehicles involving Minister of State for Home Ajay Mishra on October 3 in Lakhimpur Kheri, and four others dying in the violence that followed, western Uttar Pradesh is waiting and watching to see what’s happening next. The matter has reached the Supreme Court. Farmer leader Rakesh Tikait brokered a deal that allowed for the cr...

On September 15th, the Union Cabinet approved a series of reforms and relief measures for the telecom sector. The most significant of these is a four-year moratorium on payments stemming from the Supreme Court’s September 2020 judgement on Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR). Another one is the decision to remove all non-telecom revenue from AGR. The telecom sector is also now allowed to receive 100% FDI...

In February this year, over 200 persons were killed and the 13.2 MW Rishiganga project was washed away. The 512 MW Tapovan-Vishnugadh hydro project was damaged. Even as Uttarakhand deals with the impact of climate change, the Environment Ministry has permitted the construction of seven hyro projects in Uttarakhand. What does this mean for the vulnerable Himalayan State? We answer these and other q...

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan set the cat among the pigeons on September 25 when he said people living along the tribal belt in his country had affinity with the Taliban not because of their religious identity but because of Pashtun nationalism. He claimed that Pakistani Pashtuns had affinities and sympathy with the Afghan Taliban. Mohsin Dawar, a member of Pakistan’s National Assembly from...

The Indian women’s cricket team will be playing a pink-ball Test match starting Thursday against Australia in Queensland. This is a special occasion for the Indian women’s team as it will be their first ever Test under lights, and this is also only the second pink-ball Test in the history of women’s cricket. However, India’s women players have rarely gotten opportunities to play the long format of...

In this episode, we go deep into the crisis at Chinese real estate giant Evergrande and examine the reasons and fall-out. The property developer's debt woes have made headlines around the world, and sparked broader fears about the state of China's real estate market, which is a key driver of growth in the world's second largest economy. Will Chinese authorities be able to contain the Evergrande cr...

What can schools, colleges and policy-makers do to tackle this? Even as schools and colleges begin reopening across the country, teachers and educationists are faced not just with the academic challenges of educational institutions having remained shut for over a year, but mental health challenges as well. The lack of access to friend groups, the complete digital mode of learning and the various l...

The Quad has met in person for the first time in Washington and Prime Minister Narendra Modi Modi has had his first bilateral meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden too. A detailed joint statement was issued after the Quad meeting that detailed cooperation on a range of issues, including tackling terrorism, Afghanistan and Myanmar, while talking of increasing cooperation with ASEAN. The “C” word –...

Punjab was one of the States where the Congress was perceived to have a strong regional leader, with Capt Amarinder Singh leading the party to victory in the 2017 Assembly elections. But now he has been replaced before the end of his term. Charanjit Singh Channi, a Dalit Sikh MLA, has been sworn in as the new Chief Minister, with just a few months to go for the Assembly elections in early 2022. Wh...