This was one of the most interesting reports I read on the Lok Sabha elections. Titled, "If Sangam Pilgrims Are Bellwether, They Indicate Clear Majority for Modi",  published  in what is considered to be an anti-Narendra Modi site, "The Wire", it reports on interaction with boatmen and pilgrims from across India, even as pointing towards why Modi would get a "clear majority."

  Even as offering lip-service to the United Nations Environment Agency (UNEA) for the need to curb plastic production, the Government of India appears reluctant in reducing the production of plastic. A senior participant at the UNEP’s  fourth session  of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-4), which took place in Ottawa in April last week, told a plastics pollution seminar that India, along with China and Russia, did not want any legally binding agreement for curbing plastic pollution.

I was a little awestruck: The news had already spread that Astrazeneca – whose Indian variant Covishield was delivered to nearly 80% of Indian vaccine recipients during the Covid-19 era – has been withdrawn by the manufacturers following the  admission  by its UK pharma giant that its Covid-19 vector-based vaccine in “rare” instances cause TTS, or “thrombocytopenia thrombosis syndrome”, which lead to the blood to clump and form clots. The vaccine  reportedly  led to at least 81 deaths in the UK. As I was one of its crores of Indian recipients – I went so far as to ensure from the nurse at the local urban health centre that it was Covishield, and not the indigenously manufactured Covaxin – my worry was surely natural. Dr Amitav Banerjee, a renowned Indian epidemiologist, who has served in the armed forces for over two decades and was recently featured on Stanford University’s list of the world’s top 2% scientists, forwarded to me his  latest article  on the ...

Sam Pitroda, known as the father of Indian telecom revolution, has been in the midst of a major controversy for a  remark  on how Indians across the regions look different. While one can understand Prime Minister Narendra Modi taking it up for his electoral gain, suggesting it showed the racist Congress mindset, what was unpalatable to me was Congress leaders – particularly Jairam Ramesh, known for his deep intellectual understand – distancing themselves from what Pitroda had said. While I personally don’t see anything wrong in what Pitroda had said, I felt his was a rather rugged – perhaps a crude common person's – way of describing national unity. Be that as it may, my interactions with him -- among them one-to-one several decades ago, another as part of a civil society group in Ahmedabad -- suggest he is insightful only when he comments on information and communication technology (ICT).  The year was late 1989 or early 1990, I don’t exactly recall. At that time VP Sing...

  While the Narendra Modi government may have gone out of the way to promote the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City), sought to be developed as India’s formidable financial technology hub off the state capital Gandhinagar, just 20 km from Ahmedabad, a  recent report , prepared by Tracxn Technologies suggests that neither of the two cities figure in the list of top FinTech funding receiving centres.