Opinion

The inflationary squeeze is no longer confined to household budgets. It is spreading across the entire consumer economy. As food, transport and healthcare costs continue to rise, Indian families are being forced to rethink even routine purchases. Branded detergents, shampoos, soaps and grooming products are...

The cascade of shocks to the global economy over the past few months has offered a glimpse of our new reality. The Gulf conflict has taken an extraordinary—and dangerous— amount of oil, gas, and fertiliser off the market, and now a possible “super” El Niño...

By Bhaskar Nath Biswal The moral metric of any society is directly tied to the safety, dignity and freedom it guarantees to its children. When a state fails to protect its youngest citizens, its socioeconomic achievements ring hollow. In recent years, Odisha has taken immense...

By DV Ramana Consumer protection is a foundation of modern utility regulation. Electricity consumers frequently face problems relating to billing, metering, service quality, voltage fluctuations, disconnections, delays in providing new connections, and many other service-related issues. To address such needs of the consumers, the Electricity...

By DK Giri India saved a large part of the world in the pandemic. During Covid-19, it shipped 300m vaccine doses to 100 plus countries under ‘Vaccine Maitri’ (Vaccine Friendship). The Global South called it a lifeline. That was potential made real at the time...

By Chander Gupta It was on 18 April that I attended a book discussion on the authorised biography of Dr Karan Singh, penned by Harbans Singh, at Chandigarh. The book discussion was held under the aegis of Chandigarh Literary Society. The biography is titled ‘A...

By Rajdeep Sardesai The images tell a story that would once have embarrassed Indian politicians. In Delhi, Trinamool Congress MPs preparing to switch sides appeared perfectly comfortable being seen in the company of senior BJP leaders and Union minister Bhupender Yadav. There was little attempt...

By Zaki Laïdi The shambolic diplomacy between US President Donald Trump’s administration and Iran provides further evidence that world affairs have become unintelligible. But take a step back and you will see that all of today’s major conflicts are of a piece, and that despite...

The United Nation’s re cent proposal to move beyond GDP is a significant step that economic or thodoxy has governed policy making since World War II. In its significant report titled ‘A Compass for Progress for People and Planet’, the UN has evaluated that the...

The two mainstream ruling parties in Britain—Labour and the Tories—are using the children’s party game of ‘Musical Chairs’ as a political strategy to abandon democratic accountability, even as the quality of life and dignity of citizenship shrinks across the country, as food banks, poverty, unemployment...