Opinion

Malay Mishra In the climax scene of the iconic film Joker which fetched that year’s Academy award for its lead actor, the protagonist after shooting dead the anchor point blank, one he had idolised all his life, on a live interview set to the utter...

Dr Siddhartha Sahu With the recent deaths of sanitation workers in Cuttack hitting headlines, the Orissa High Court took suo moto cognizance of the matter. The High Court observed that manual scavenging is a shameful practice that shocks the judicial and collective conscience, and sought...

Dhanada K Mishra In 2019, the treasury department of the UK government commissioned Prof. Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University to carry out a comprehensive global review of the economics of biodiversity. Coming on the heels of the IPCC’s ‘Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5...

Vappala Balachandran The Maharashtra Police-politician squabble is now being legally processed by the CBI under orders of the Bombay High Court. Hence, this analysis is not on that specific issue but on a larger subject of police-politician relations affecting the general public. While one should...

SN Misra & Sanjaya Kumar Ghadai World Economic Forum’s recently published Gender Gap Report (2021) shows that India has slipped by 28 places compared to the Gender Gap Report (2020), with a ranking of 140 out of 156 countries surveyed. Sadly, in South Asia, India...

Ashok Mahapatra No country is entirely self-sufficient, and every country relies on maritime trade to sell what it has and buy what it needs. Shipping helps ensure that the benefits of trade and commerce are more evenly spread. However, it is a pity that the...

Jayati Ghosh One of the most significant socioeconomic changes accelerated by Covid-19 must surely be the rise of digital labour platforms. Of course, platform-based employment had already been growing exponentially before the pandemic. But the combination of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, and the consequent greater...

Melvin Durai My wife loves music and decided many years ago that it would be wise for us to invest in a piano and pay for weekly lessons for our three children. This has worked well for two of our kids, who may never play...

Piyush Ranjan Rout Exactly a year ago lockdown was imposed in most of the world’s urban areas and Bhubaneswar was no exception. During the period, people took up many activities at their homes to keep themselves engaged. Thousands of Bhubaneswar residents planted ‘lockdown gardens’ in...

Bighneswar Swain Gun control is one of the most divisive issues in American politics. With each mass shooting — defined as four or more victims having been killed indiscriminately — antagonism grows between both sides of the gun control argument. Proponents of stricter gun regulations...