Editorials

Memories of tracking cricket in the Australian summer inevitably have the alarm clock’s shrill ring during nippy December dawns. It was an annual ritual: wake up groggy, gulp your morning brew and catch live action beamed in from Channel Nine.The telecast quality was top-drawer; the commentary was a mix of …

In a crucial development that exposes the flaws in health policy-making in the country, the Delhi High Court quashed a government ban on the retail sale and private manufacture of oxytocin. Notified by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in April, the ban referred to a 2016 Himachal …

Five years ago, there wasn’t even a sliver of hope that any influential Congress leader would be brought to justice for the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. A trial court had acquitted former MP Sajjan Kumar, rejecting the testimony of witnesses who said he was seen instigating riots in the Raj …

A good auditor is a good listener” said President Ram Nath Kovind during his recent speech at the 29th Accountants General Conference. “You will not only see the accounts in their books, but also listen to their accounts,” he said. It is only when this conception is accepted that audits …

Ever since voters have been provided the ‘None of the Above’ (NOTA) option if they do not want to vote for any of the candidates in the fray, political parties now cite many voters having chosen NOTA as a reason for losing an election. This may be true in very …

Centrism, as an essential characteristic of Indian politics, signifies the institutional incentive that political parties have to adopt a set of policies aimed at harmonising societal and cultural contradictions rather than accentuating them. Some of its essential elements are: centrality of an accommodative approach, appeal to minorities, welfarism and a …

“Until you start focussing on what needs to be done, rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope,” said Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old activist from Sweden who shook the United Nations gathering at Katowice, Poland, with her plain speaking. But what she said should not happen is exactly …

Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh “broke down crying” when he finally made up with Andrew Symonds after the infamous “monkeygate” scandal had sent the Australian all-rounder into a downward spiral, he revealed on Sunday.A decade on from the ugly incident in the 2008 Sydney Test, where Harbhajan Singh was accused of …

Toys have ceased to be the simple contraptions, or elementary games of yore that stimulated the imagination in children. They have now morphed into flashy, digital gadgets. But are these toys doing more harm than good to childrenIn a report published online this month in the peer-reviewed Pediatrics , experts …

Chances are, cutting down screen time, especially on your phone, is somewhere on the top of your list of new year resolutions for 2019. And there are any number of productivity hacks and tips for intentional living to guide you in segregating screen-free chunks of time on your daily schedule. …

Hardly a week passes nowadays without a new corporate governance-related issue roiling the markets. The ripples created by IL&FS and ICICI Bank had hardly begun to die down when news broke of Jet Airways’ principal lender, State Bank of India, ordering a forensic audit of the troubled airline’s accounts for …

When we were kids, many of us had the idea that being in charge of something, a team, a class, a project meant that you had to shout a lot. Speaking loudly and constantly and then going up a gear into a full-throated roar was, it seemed to us, the …

Aerobic activities such as jogging and interval training can make our cells biologically younger, according to a noteworthy new experiment. Weight training may not have the same effect, the study found, raising interesting questions about how various types of exercise affect us at a microscopic level and whether the differences …

The days when inflation could topple governments appear to be gone. It is now time for the government to worry about falling prices, especially of food. Retail inflation dropped to a 17-month low of 2.33% in November, as compared to 3.31% in October, primarily due to the fall in the …

Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decision to resign as Prime Minister, an office to which he was controversially installed by President Maithripala Sirisena, is the first sign that the dragging constitutional crisis in Sri Lanka is heading slowly towards a resolution. He had also played a part in the unfolding of the crisis …

The pervasiveness of climatic aberrations and the associated socio-economic vulnerability are now widely recognised and experienced across the globe. The Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on “Global Warming at 1.5°C” distinctly propagates the need to strengthen and enhance existing coping capacity and to remain …

After remaining in suspended animation for five months, the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly was dissolved by Governor Satya Pal Malik last month. After the November-December 2014 elections to the State Assembly, which produced a fractured mandate, J&K had several years of a Peoples Democratic Party-BJP coalition government, interspersed with a …

For the first time since fleeing to neighbouring Tripura 21 years ago, the displaced Brus of Mizoram exercised their franchise on home soil during the Assembly polls on November 28. Rahul Karmakar reports on the changing dynamic between the minority Brus and the dominant Mizos and the possibility of greater …

The fourth meeting of the Bombay Engineering Congress was opened yesterday [in Bombay on December 12] in the Board Room of the G.I.P. Railway. Over one hundred members were present from all parts of the presidency including Sind and representing different branches of Engineering. The president, Mr. F.J. Preston, delivered …

Pakistan police to-day [December 13] opened fire at two places in Chittagong in East Pakistan, injuring 12 persons, according to a Radio Pakistan broadcast monitored here [New Delhi] to-night. A violent crowd attacked a food train during the Opposition-sponsored province-wide hartal to-day. When the police interfered, the crowd attacked them. …