'India has continued to make very little headway in improving the status of human development within the country, moving up only five notches on the United Nation’s recently released Human Development Index (HDI), a ranked list that measures various dimensions of human well-being. According to the report, which was published on Monday, India placed at 130 out of a list of over 180 countries and continues to remain in the ‘medium human development category’— a group of countries that includes Botswana (Rank 106), Iraq (Rank 121), and Cambodia (Rank 143)...
'Incredibly, the government of India will spend more on this one line than it does on rail safety, Swachh Bharat, schools, highways or health... In every which way, Narendra Modi’s 2014 campaign was spectacular. From communication to ground management, the Bharatiya Janata Party electoral machine, it is widely acknowledged, got it right. However, a year and a half after Modi took office, one aspect of his campaign seems to have been a bit too spectacular altogether.
'New Delhi's negotiators in Paris say that Indians emit only 1.6 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year per capita. But that statistic doesn't tell the whole story... The per capita statistic has come under attack from many organisations in recent years. All Indians are not created equal: like everything else there is stark inequality between the carbon footprints of the richest and the poorest.
'...Modi's emphatic victory in the 2014 elections was widely attributed to his having focused on the agenda of economic modernization - that is to say, the need to nourish technological innovation, to make manufacturing viable again, to create better infrastructure, and to improve transparency and efficiency in government. Those loyal to the BJP and Hindutva had, of course, voted for him.
'This week we once again heard the prime minister and finance minister speak, at a recent media house event in the capital, about how well the economy is doing. The truth is nothing can improve our economic fundamentals till public investment is sharply increased. Manipulating statistics may help manage global headlines for a while, but cannot strengthen our economic fundamentals.
'The judgment of the Supreme Court in the Raj Bala case deals a near fatal blow to the health of the Indian democracy. In essence, the court has held that those who have no formal education, those who have no “functioning toilet” and those who are in rural indebtedness cannot contest an election for the position of sarpanch. The judgment effectively disenfranchises – and it recognises this – 68% of Scheduled Caste women, 41% of Scheduled Caste men and over 50% of all women in Haryana from contesting a panchayat election.
'The BJP’s victory in the Lok Sabha election of 2014 was the result of a strategy that concentrated single-mindedly on building up Narendra Modi as a national leader who could salvage India from what the media projected as the mess created by the Congress Party during the previous three or four years. That regime was marred by corruption scandals and a pervasive sense that Manmohan Singh had failed to rein in corrupt ministers and allies.
'On Saturday, senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram admitted that the ban on Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was unjust. “I have no hesitation in saying that the ban on Salman Rushdie’s book was wrong,” he said. The proscription was imposed 27 years back, in 1988, when Chidambaram was the Minister of State Home Affairs in Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet. The novel had outraged conservative Muslim opinion when it was published.
'Taking advantage of the skewed pricing policy of successive governments both at the Centre and at the state level, rice mill owners across India have been literally milling thousands of crores of rupees for themselves through the sale of paddy by-products left over from the rice they process for the public distribution system (PDS). The by-products of rice milling are bran, husk, broken rice and nooks which enjoy a lucrative market – giving millers high returns on something which they do not have to spend a single rupee to buy. They get them for free...
'Relations between Nepal and India have frozen over what continues to be an impasse over the Himalayan nation’s Constitution. The blockade continues with the anti-India sentiment in Nepal soaring as the country faces an acute shortage of cooking gas, fuel, and life saving medicines. China has come to the rescue and signed agreements with Nepal for the supply of cooking gas and fuel.
