Elon Musk is coming to India. He is meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and is likely to announce the entry of Tesla into the Indian market. The timing of this visit is interesting. Tesla used to be the world’s largest seller of electric vehicles or EVs – but it lost that title to China’s BYD Auto last year. Also, most of the EV markets in the We…

Earlier this month, following a report in The Guardian stating that the Indian government had killed about 20 people in Pakistan since 2020 as part of a broader plan to eliminate terrorists on foreign soil, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh responded that India will enter Pakistan to kill terrorists. A few days later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too…

The Indian government recently brought in an amendment to the Wildlife Protection Act with regard to captive elephants. This amendment, the rules for which came in last month, regulates the transfer or transport of captive elephants, and has sparked an outcry from animal rights activists. Elephants are, according to the Wildlife Protection Act, a S…

It was expected that Iran would respond to the bombing of its consulate in Syria on April 1 in an Israeli strike. The retaliation came last Saturday when Iran launched a direct attack on Israel. Israel claims to have intercepted 99% of the 300-odd drones and missiles fired by Iran, but a few of the missiles did sneak through its defences and hit se…

It’s election time in India. The Modi government is touting India’s strength abroad as one of its achievements. Earlier in April, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at an election rally that India today kills terrorists in their own homes. Asked about a report in the Guardian newspaper that India had killed 20 alleged terrorists in recent years in P…

Is it okay for the Union government to impose limits on how much a State government can borrow? Or does a state government have an “enforceable right” to decide its own borrowing limits? This question, raised by the Kerala government, has been referred to a Constitution Bench by the Supreme Court. The key constitutional question that the Supreme Co…

The 17th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) is seeing a rather unusual controversy – Indian fans have been booing, and in some cases, abusing, a star player of the national team wherever he’s gone to play. At the receiving end is Hardik Pandya, the erstwhile captain of Gujarat Titans, who has moved to Mumbai Indians. He is now the skipper o…

India announced recently, that it has completed the 10,000 genome project – a reference database of whole-genome sequences, from people in India. About 20 institutions were involved in the project. India has a population of 1.3 billion with over 4,600 population groups, many of them endogamous. This project is seen as an important step to find out …

If the data relating to electoral bonds placed the spotlight on corporate entities buying favours from political parties, the actions of enforcement agencies point to officials taking cues from their political masters in going after opposition politicians. The Indian Express newspaper reported on April 3 that as many as 23 out of 25 prominent polit…

Plastics pollution is a major global crisis, with deadly repercussions for human health, marine life, and climate change. In March 2022, the United Nations set the ball rolling for the conclusion of a Global Plastics Treaty by the end of 2024. Later this month, we have the penultimate session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), wh…

Bengaluru, often celebrated for being a ‘garden city’, the ‘IT capital’ of the country, and its pleasant weather, has been making headlines this year for facing a severe water crisis following the drought of 2023. The water crisis is also likely to hit other urban centres and rural areas. According to a recent weekly bulletin by the Central Water C…

The controversy over Katchatheevu is back in the media spotlight. With just a few weeks left for the Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised the issue by claiming that the Congress “gave away” Katchatheevu. He also claimed that the DMK, in contrast to its public posturing, was fully kept in the loop as the Congress “ceded” Katchath…

The India Employment Report 2024, released recently by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), paints a grim picture. The news is particularly bad on two critical counts: joblessness is particularly high among the youth, and its worse for the educated youth. According to the report, India’s youth account for 83% of the unemployed workforce, wi…

On March 10th, India signed a free trade agreement with a group of four European nations, committing to reduce tariffs. In return, India would receive $100 billion in investments over the next 15 years. The non-EU bloc, known as the European Free Trade Association, consists of Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. This agreement has come …

After several failed efforts, the United Nations Security Council managed to pass a resolution on March 25 calling for an immediate ceasefire in Palestine. Resolution 2728 passed because unlike in three previous occasions the United States chose not to use its veto power but abstained. The resolution passed 14-0. In a related development, the Inter…

Weight-loss drugs including Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro have been making headlines across the world for weight loss – celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk have spoken about using them to quickly and drastically lose weight. First approved for diabetes treatment, these drugs, which consist of semaglutide – are available in tablet and i…

Many companies that faced regulatory action from the Enforcement Directorate (ED) or Income Tax (IT) Department donated electoral bonds worth crores of rupees to ruling parties via the electoral bonds route, show data submitted by the State Bank of India (SBI) to the Election Commission of India (ECI). Some companies which got huge government contr…

A deadly terrorist attack in Moscow on March 22 left more than 130 people dead and nearly 200 injured. This was the deadliest mass shooting incident in Russia since the 2004 Beslan school siege. The Islamic State—Khorasan Province (IS-KP) has claimed responsibility for the attack. President Vladimir Putin has said that radical Islamists were behind…

It’s hard to imagine a world without plastic now – plastic exists in almost every sphere of our life. Microplastics, the tiny toxic particles that plastics shed and that are scattered across the environment have been found everywhere – from clouds, to the bottom of the ocean, in Antarctica and even in our bodies – we swallow them and we breathe the…

After repeated prodding from the Supreme Court, the State Bank of India has finally disclosed the full details of the electoral bonds bought and redeemed. The Election Commission has made the data public. This comes in the wake of the electoral bond being established as patently unconstitutional, a mode of political funding susceptible to corrupt p…

Recently, hours after resigning as a judge of the Calcutta High Court, Abhijit Gangopadhyay announced that he was joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The judge’s decision to join politics and the manner in which it was taken has raised questions of judicial impropriety. Some people disapprove of the practice of judges holding official posts a…

Pre-dawn air strikes by Pakistan on Afghan territory targeting Tehreek-e-Taliban, or TTP, militants on the 19th of March mark a new low in relations between Kabul and Islamabad. Pakistan claims that it retaliated against TTP strongholds in Afghanistan following a terror strike in North Waziristan on the 16th of March in which 7 Pakistani security p…

The 2024 Lok Sabha polls will be held from April 19 in seven phases across the country. In Bihar, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh, voting will take place in all the seven phases. Assembly elections will also be held simultaneously in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh. The last phase of voting will be on June 1 and counting will t…

It’s that time of the year again, when exams are looming, and students are stressed. Most students in India write a number of exams -- from the final boards at schools to the multiple competitive tests that are attempted to try and get a seat at coveted medical or engineering colleges. The process is so difficult – lakhs of students competing for a…

NITI Aayog B.V.R. Subrahmanyam recently claimed that less than 5% of Indians now live below the poverty line. He made the claim based on the findings of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES), 2022-23. Mr. Subrahmanyam argued that the average consumption expenditure in the bottom 5% of India’s population, as estimated by the survey, is…

NITI Aayog B.V.R. Subrahmanyam recently claimed that less than 5% of Indians now live below the poverty line. He made the claim based on the findings of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES), 2022-23. Mr. Subrahmanyam argued that the average consumption expenditure in the bottom 5% of India’s population, as estimated by the survey, is…

The resignation of Arun Goel as Election Commissioner just ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections has created ripples in Indian politics. For the first time since 1993, a single-member Election Commission is currently supervising poll preparations in the world’s largest democracy. There is no word on why Mr. Goel, who was handpicked by the BJP gover…

With peak summer approaching, Bengaluru is already facing a water crisis. The city, which is dependent on the Cauvery river and groundwater for its freshwater needs, remains vulnerable to drought in the dry seasons and flooding in the monsoon months. With its bore wells having to contend with receding water tables, and tankers having to travel incr…

The 164 member world trade organisation holds what it calls a Ministerial Conference – a once in two years meeting of all its member countries to discuss, negotiate and address global trade rules. WTO’s thirteenth ministerial conference, or MC13 – took place in Abu Dhabi in late February this year, but it failed to make headway on key agenda items.…

Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has his task cut out for him. From steering the economy out of choppy waters to dealing with a belligerent opposition that continues to contest the results of February’s general elections, Mr. Sharif has to show that he is up to the job. As Cabinet formation and election of a new President await Pakistan…

Earlier this week, a seven-judge Bench of the Supreme Court ruled that MPs and MLAs are not immune to criminal prosecution on bribery charges related to their votes or speech in Parliament or state assemblies. This judgement overturns an earlier ruling of the Supreme Court in the 1998 Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) case. In this case, the majority op…

The Surrogacy (Regulation) Act was passed in 2021, but over two years later, it continues to be mired in some amount of confusion and on-going cases in the Supreme Court. Brought in to ban commercial surrogacy, it allows only for altruistic surrogacy under certain conditions, and aims to regulate surrogacy clinics, part of the huge infertility heal…

Ever since the English cricket team arrived in India, ‘Bazball’ is on the lips of every cricket buff. It is a unique style of play that paid rich dividends for the English team --until the India tour. England is trailing the five-match Test series 1-3, and there is a lot of debate around whether ‘Bazball’ has been overhyped, and if England has fail…

Engineered cross-voting to win extra seats in the Rajya Sabha and organized defection to bring down duly-elected State Governments appear to have been normalized in Indian politics. The additional two seats that accrued to the BJP in Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh recently is a case in point. Though six cross-voting MLAs have been disqualified …

From time to time, stories of the commercial dealings in organs, or cash for kidney scams, surface in the media. In December, one such possible organ racket was in the news, involving people from Myanmar, who had come to a private hospital in Delhi for transplant procedures. Organ transplants have been taking place in India since the 1970s, and aft…

It’s now exactly two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. According to President Volodymyr Zelensky, so far 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have perished in the war. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced. The population in territories under Kyiv’s control has shrunk from 52 million to 30 million while the country’s economy has been devastated. As for…

On February 13, groups of farmers began a march to New Delhi, to press for fulfilment of their demands, which include a legal guarantee for purchasing crops at Minimum Support Price (MSP) and India’s withdrawal from the World Trade Organization (WTO) which, they allege, places pressure on the Centre for drafting policies for procurement and MSP. Wh…

Housing is a basic requirement for dignity of life. But affordable decent housing remains a distant dream for most Indians, especially in urban India. Close to 17% of all households in urban India live in slums, with this percentage shooting up to 41% in a city like Mumbai and 29% in Chennai. Over the years, the government has taken many initiative…

Most of us are familiar with the plastic waste crisis and public awareness campaigns on the need to recycle plastic. Now a new report by the Centre for Climate Integrity, an international non-profit, says that plastic producers have been lying to the public for more than 30 years – it says that they knew all along that plastic recycling was not a v…

The headline in a recent article was arresting – India fears losing out to China in smartphone exports race. Another broke the news that Mexico had overtaken China for the first time in 20 years as the largest exporter to the US. One more said – loud and clear at t that – that India should realise that Vietnam, and not China, was the major competit…

Farmers are back at the barricades, this time they have been stopped by the Haryana police at the Punjab-Haryana border. Twenty-two-year-old Shubhkaran Singh has died in the protests. Farmer leaders have suspended their protest till February 29 when they will announce their next course of action. The agitating farmers are firm that there should be …

Controlling a computer with just your thoughts seems to be something straight out of a science fiction movie, but that’s exactly what scientific experiments are now doing. This week Elon Musk, founder of the startup Neuralink which implanted a brain chip, called Telepathy, into a human being last month, said that the patient’s progress has been goo…

The Lok Sabha elections of 2024 are round the corner. The season of defections is also upon us. Party hopping has commenced in earnest. An India Today poll suggested earlier in February that the NDA would win 335 seats in 2024 down from 353 in 2019. The Congress tally was put at 71. A YouGov-Mint-CPR survey, also published in February, said that 51…

A five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously struck down the Centre’s electoral bond scheme. Electoral bonds enabled anonymous political donations, which the apex court has termed as “unconstitutional”. It stated categorically that the scheme violates the right to information under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitutio…