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The Supreme Court on Wednesday said the country needed Election Commissioners (ECs) who would not shirk from even taking on the Prime Minister if required, and not just “weak-kneed” yes-men. “Suppose the Election Commissioner is asked to take on none less than the Prime Minister… we are just giving an …

More than 270 members of the Kuki-Chin community from Bangladesh who entered Mizoram on November 20 are being referred to as “officially displaced persons” in State government records, as India does not have a law on refugees. A senior Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) official told The Hindu that the issue was …

Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister has issued a working paper by Sanjeev Sanyal Member EAC-PM and Akanksha Arora . The Paper analyses three perception-based indices: Freedom in the World Index, V-DEM indices, and EIU Democracy Index . The  EAC-PM tweeted the following thread which finds serious problems with …

The IPRD is an apex level international annual conference of Indian Navy, and is principal manifestation of Navy’s engagement at the strategic-level. The National Maritime Foundation (NMF) is Navy’s knowledge partner and chief organizer of each edition of the event. The IPRD seeks to foster exchange of ideas and promote …

Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and Textiles, Shri Piyush Goyal said that duties on 100 percent tariff lines would be eliminated by Australia under the landmark India-Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (Ind-Aus ECTA). He was addressing a press conference on the ECTA …

Background: In an order on November 16, the Supreme Court asked the Indian Air Force (IAF) to consider the grant of pensionary benefits to 32 Short Service Commission (SSC) women officers, who fought for 12 long years to be reinstated and granted permanent commission. This is the latest in a …

India and the UAE are going ahead with food security cooperation under the I2U2, a new West Asian quadrilateral that includes Israel and the U.S. UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar discussed the cooperation under this initiative on Tuesday. “On food …

Facing less than a lukewarm response to project Unnati, which aims to reduce dependence on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) by imparting skill training to its beneficiaries, the Union Rural Development Ministry wants to link performances of the States under the project with its labour budget …

A new draft of the much-awaited data protection Bill, the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDP Bill) 2022, is now open for public comments. The Government had previously withdrawn an earlier draft by averring that it would come up with a “comprehensive legal framework” on data privacy and Internet regulation, …

The ongoing war in Ukraine on the one hand and the confrontation between Russia (India’s traditional partner) and the United States and the West (also India’s partners) on the other have increased the frequency/regularity of this question. When great powers seek India’s support during geopolitical contestations, such as the one …

The Supreme Court on Tuesday said the government pays mere “lip-service” to the independence of the Election Commissioners and this is evident from the way the tenures of Chief Election Commissioners (CECs) have “slid” down from over eight years in the 1950s to just about a few hundred days after …

Raksha Mantri Shri Rajnath Singh stated that Government-accelerated Development Initiatives in North East have transformed ‘Look East policy’ into ‘Act East Policy’, leading to all round developments in the Northeast region, enabling all the states to improve trade with South East Asian Nations. He was addressing the two-day conclave on the theme …

Close on the heels of assuming the presidency of G20, a league of world’s largest economies, India will take over the chair of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), an international initiative to support responsible and human-centric development and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI has been Catalyzing the …

In 2014, the Delhi High Court held that both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were guilty of illegally accepting donations from two companies registered in India but whose controlling shareholder was Vedanta, a foreign company. The court held that this was in contravention of the Foreign Contribution …

Background: The latest draft of the data protection law — the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 (DPDP Bill, 2022) — has now been made open for public comments. This article deals with various themes within the Bill including data localisation requirements, whether children are considered as data principals, the …

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Monday announced a National Suicide Prevention Strategy, the first of its kind in the country, with time-bound action plans and multi-sectoral collaborations to achieve reduction in suicide mortality by 10% by 2030. The strategy broadly seeks to establish effective surveillance mechanisms for …

The Centre is bringing out a standard for publishing product reviews on e-commerce platforms from Friday. To start with, the standard will be voluntary, but could become mandatory later after observing compliance with the standard by such platforms. The framework for the standard was prepared by the Bureau of Indian …

It is after many years that we have a judgment which elaborates on the meaning of equality under India’s Constitution in its true and expansive spirit. Here I am not referring to the majority judgment in the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) case, but the minority opinion of the Chief Justice …

The Centre’s significantly shortened and revised draft Bill on personal data protection proposes a hefty increase in penalty amounts up to ₹500 crore, while also easing rules on cross-border data flows, in a big relief for large tech firms. The revised draft—now called The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 …

In recent years, there has been a grave erosion of constitutional provisions, constitutional morality, and constitutional ethos being witnessed among various constitutional bodies. If the manner of functioning by institutions such as the Election Commission of India and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India has left much to be …