Last year, on December 22, an incident of bonded labour reached the national headlines, even if only for a fleeting moment. BJP president Amit Shah tweeted on the subject. A week earlier, 52 trafficked labourers had been rescued from a ginger farm in Karnataka where they had been made to …

Revenue collections from the Goods and Services Tax (GST) are going too far off the mark for comfort. Inflows declined for the second consecutive month in December to Rs. 94,726 crore from Rs. 97,637 crore in November and Rs. 1,00,710 crore in the month before. Between April and December, GST …

The diplomatic row between Beijing and Ottawa over the detention and treatment of Canadian nationals in China continues to escalate, to the detriment of bilateral relations. But more serious could be the implications of the standoff for the ongoing trade war between China and the U.S. The spat goes back …

The Cabinet has approved a significant relaxation of development controls along the coastline through the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification 2018, as part of a plan to encourage construction of buildings and launch tourism activities in areas that are closer to the high tide line. State governments and others had …

Last year, in October at Astana, Kazakhstan, world leaders declared their commitment to ‘Primary Care’. They were reaffirming what their predecessors had done in Alma Ata in 1978. The Alma Ata Declaration, as it was called, had been criticised as wishful thinking without a clear road map on strategies and …

On December 18, the Union Ministry of Power issued a seemingly anodyne memo that set the rules for the flow of electricity across South Asian borders. Evaluated against the turbulent politics around the issue, the new guidelines are a startling departure from India’s previous stance. In an atmosphere of regional …

India does not gain anything by escalating the nuclear arms race in the region with INS Arihant The indigenous nuclear submarine, INS Arihant ( picture ), is a great achievement for India. The Indian Navy, its engineers and scientists have done us immensely proud. But it might not be inappropriate …

Any rigid secular approach, unrestrained by considerations of electoral politics, could only lead to disapproval of Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s demonstration of his religious faith and his characterisation of the Congress as a “party of Hinduism”. His approach has been widely termed “soft Hindutva”, and as an attempt to compete …

NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft has beamed back new images of volcanic plumes on Jupiter’s moon Io, captured during the mission’s 17th flyby of the gas giant. On December 21, four of Juno’s cameras captured images of the Jovian moon Io, the most volcanic body in the solar system. Source : …

Morocco has been named the second best performing country after Sweden in the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI). The North African country significantly increased the share of renewables over the past five years and increased new renewable energy capacity. Sweden is in top position, followed by Morocco and Lithuania in …