Opinion

Jayati Ghosh Those who thought that a pandemic would make everyone realise the crucial role of care workers should think again. With the coronavirus still spreading rapidly, frontline workers are more essential – and at greater risk – than ever, yet public attention has shifted...

Bharat Jhunjhunwala Some two hundred years ago, the share of India in the world income was 25 per cent and China’s was 33 per cent. That declined to 1 per cent and 2 per cent respectively in 1950. These have since increased to 4 per...

Dr S. Saraswathi UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has stressed that every death in police custody with signs of torture should be investigated. The South Asia Director of Human Rights Watch has said that it is important for the authorities in India to embark upon robust...

Dr Santosh Kumar Mohapatra With shrinking revenue, the Union government has reprioritized its spending and taken a slew of new austerity measures to contain the fiscal deficit and overcome the mounting debt burden. The current fiscal, the government banned new public-funded schemes and freezed creation...

Prof Shankar Prasad Pati Two MIT professors along with a doctoral student have calibrated Covid-19 data on testings, reported cases, reported deaths, and overall mortality from 84 nations. The team included India, but not China, while making a projection vis-à-vis the pandemic’s spread by February...

Ashok Mahapatra The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) defines the rights and responsibilities of nations with respect to their use of the world’s oceans, establishing guidelines for businesses, the environment, and the management of marine natural resources. It replaced the...

Melvin Durai Responding to an online petition, the matrimonial website Shaadi.com recently removed a skin complexion filter that allowed people to search for potential partners through descriptors such as “fair,” “wheatish” and “dark.” This is a welcome change. I certainly wouldn’t want to categorise myself...

Naveen Jindal A  global pandemic threatening the very human civilization may not be the best of times to discuss population explosion and the strain that it puts on a nation’s resources, exchequer, and the national and social fabric. Look no further than New Zealand as...

Dhanada K Mishra We are an examination-obsessed country proven conclusively by the latest guidelines issued by the top higher education regulator, the University Grants Commission. The guidelines say the universities “are required to complete the examinations by the end of September 2020 in offline (pen...

T Jacob John and Jagdish Rattanani There is criticism against the ICMR over its recent diktat to deliver a vaccine for Covid-19 by Independence Day, August 15. The direction is flawed and the ICMR has made itself and India lose respect. That the purpose of...