Government Policy

For a long time, proponents of the internationalisation of higher education have cherished the dream of foreign universities operating in India. For nearly two decades, they have emphasised the need to provide conducive conditions and an enabling framework for such institutions. But the idea failed to come to fruition due …

Union Sports Minister Anurag Thakur on Monday announced that six-time World champion and Olympic medallist boxer M.C. Mary Kom will head a government-appointed five-member Oversight Committee to investigate the charges levelled by some prominent wrestlers against Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh. Olympic medallist wrestler Yogeshwar …

A report by the World Bank, released in November last year, on financing India’s urban infrastructure needs, focuses on private investments ameliorating urban problems. The push to attract private capital, since the 1990s, followed by the urban reforms under the United Progressive Alliance I regime, the Smart City mission, and …

The last time China’s population saw a decline was in 1961, in the midst of a devastating four-year famine following Mao’s failed “Great Leap Forward” campaign. The latest decline in population, however, is no blip. The shrinking of the world’s most populous country by as much as 8,50,000 in 2022 …

As Syria enters the 13th year of its lethal civil conflict, a bomb explosion in Istanbul on November 13, that killed six persons, seems to have accelerated a diplomatic process which could bring peace to that tormented land. Turkish authorities immediately blamed Kurdish militants in Syria, represented by the People’s …

China’s population declined by 850,000 in 2022, the first such fall since a nationwide famine in 1961, marking a landmark demographic shift for the world’s second-largest economy. The National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing on Tuesday said the national population stood at 1.411 billion at the end of 2022. India …

The Union Budget of 2023-24, India’s final full-year Budget before the Lok Sabha polls in 2024, is unlikely to see any major reforms and could see higher allocations for welfare measures as well as capex along with cuts in defence expenditure, as witnessed in recent pre-election Budgets, Goldman Sachs said …

Russia is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” said Winston Churchill in 1939, referring to the West’s muddled understanding of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. The words of the Conservative leader, who led Britain during wartime, still ring true as the world, 10 months into Russia’s invasion of …

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) ended 2022 by passing a resolution that asked the body’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) , to render its opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s prolonged occupation of Palestinian land. The resolution was passed with 87 member countries voting favourably, …

Colombo’s seafront is lit up. Fairy lights, reindeer, and Christmas trees dot the stretch that leads to the Presidential Secretariat, the colonial-era building that served as the Parliament until the early 1980s. On the steps before its 14 giant pillars, a choir sings popular carols — an initiative of the …