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Sikkim will soon have a separate department for non-performing babus. Chief Minister Prem Singh Golay announced this while addressing a meeting of entrepreneurs in Gangtok. It wasn’t an April Fools Day gag, in case you are wondering but said with some seriousness, and in the...

The global far right is gloating. After recent setbacks, one of their standard-bearers, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, won an overwhelming victory in this month’s parliamentary election. While figures like the Italian nationalist politician Matteo Salvini have appeared to pay a price for their past...

“We live in a more shock-prone world,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva recently observed, “and we need the strength of the collective to deal with shocks to come.” She’s right. In the space of just a few weeks, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already shifted...

A great experiment in Israeli politics appears to be heading for an abrupt end much before it could be properly tried. The government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett experienced its first and perhaps final coalition crisis after a relatively obscure coalition member, Idit Silman, announced...

Political parties and apolitical organizations have been protesting again against a move by the Centre to make Hindi a compulsory language up to class X. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has raked up this old issue by pushing the cause of Hindi in non-Hindi speaking...

After unprecedented twists and turns in the political drama in Pakistan, the fate of the Imran Khan government was finally sealed April 9 when he was deposed by a no-confidence vote in Parliament, days after he had blocked a similar attempt. Democracy has not been...

What is democratic government? Often it is reduced to one essential element, and that is the electoral process. This refers to having heads of government who are elected through fair and free elections. And also to whether or not all sections of society have the...

It’s a crisis. Critics often say that India has too much bureaucracy. But actually, as admitted by the Centre, there are not enough babus. The Minister of State for PMO and Personnel, Jitendra Singh recently informed Parliament that there is a shortage of 1,515 IAS...

Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was expected to win re-election to a fourth consecutive four-year term this weekend, owing to a rigged electoral system and a largely state-controlled media that made it impossible for the united opposition to reach many voters. But the scale...

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its latest report released April 4, has made one departure from what it has so long been doing for the past few years. Instead of predicting doom for reckless plunder of nature and emission of greenhouse...