Opinion

Palitha Abeykoon, Maha El Rabbat & David Nabarro As special envoys on COVID-19 for the director-general of the World Health Organization, we have witnessed firsthand the intensity of the suffering caused by the pandemic, especially in poorer communities. This profound tragedy has been evolving before...

Shivaji Mohinta With the onset of Covid-19, I have observed numerous occasions where leaders or top executives have resorted to micro-managing and adopt top-down command and control measures such as finding out about routine tasks, seeking daily status updates, frequent checking ins and probing. I...

SN Misra There are three seminal supreme court judgements which have stood the test of time viz. Kesavananda Bharati (1973), affirming inviolability of basic structure, SR Bommai (1995) making floor test mandatory for adjudicating majority and Indra Sawhney(1992) putting a cap of 50% on reservation....

Melvin Durai Bill and Melinda Gates announced recently that they are getting divorced after 27 years of marriage. The Microsoft co-founder and his wife are worth a combined $124 billion and have given away a portion of their wealth through the Bill and Melinda Gates...

Junaid Nabi When I was growing up in northern India’s Kashmir Valley, my physician father would often accompany me when I received my annual vaccinations. I used to ask him how vaccines worked and where they were developed. After explaining the basic biology of the...

Ajit Ranade Last October, India and South Africa proposed in the World Trade Organization that intellectual property rights of Covid-related drugs and vaccines be suspended.  This proposal was supported by 60 countries. However, the US, still under the Trump administration and the EU were opposed...

Rosalind McKenna In March, South Sudan received its first batch of COVID-19 vaccines. While that is good news, it came almost four months after the first doses were administered in the United Kingdom, highlighting the wide disparities in global vaccine distribution. If these gaps are...

Chandra Shekhar Chitrala As a child, I remember feeling puzzled when reading about people being referred to as critics. I wondered why anyone would want to criticise something, and more importantly, why others not only allowed the critic to make unpleasant remarks, but actually paid...

Jayati Ghosh The Biden administration’s decision to stop opposing a proposed Covid-19 waiver of certain intellectual property rights under World Trade Organization rules is a welcome move. The US Trade Representative acknowledges that “the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.” While...

Dhanada K Mishra When my host Federico Giovanni, a fifty-something, tall, athletic, and handsome Italian, offered to take me cycling about four months ago, I was sceptical, not without reason. The beautiful Sai Kung country park in the New Territories in Hong Kong is a...