Opinion

Cecilia Tortajada and Asit K. Biswas The Covid-19 pandemic is likely to transform our behaviours, attitudes, and policies in many areas. For the sake of overcoming the public-health crisis and enabling economic recovery, one must hope that water and wastewater management will be among them....

Dr. Guru Prasad Mohanta Reports speak of shortage in and black-marketing of the most-promising Covid–19 medicine, Remdesivir, in the open market. The black-market prices are substantially higher, making the medicines unaffordable. The police have registered cases against the black-marketers. Realising the potential of this experimental...

Ajit Ranade Covid-19 has pushed the world into a deep recession. India is no exception. The national economy will shrink by about six per cent this financial year. This means the national income will be lower than last year, and every household on an average...

Saeed Naqvi The utter irrelevance of the Sachin Pilot-Ashok Gehlot spat is matched only by the saturation coverage accorded to the mishap by the media – at least a large section of it. Of Rajasthan’s storm in a teacup the amplification is more disturbing than...

Aparimita Mishra The coronavirus-induced lockdown severely affected many lives. The plight of migrants and their families, captured through horrifying images, brought out their rights to the centre stage. Partly as a response to this, state agencies and NGOs tried to provide some help to stranded...

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...