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Soon after Portugal’s António Guterres was picked to succeed Ban Ki-moon as the United Nations Secretary-General, commentary on the major challenges awaiting him was dominated by the Security Council’s paralysis in resolving the Syrian conflict. There was also mention of climate change, North Korea’s nukes, Africa’s wars and the refugee crisis engulfing Europe. Nobody had anticipated then that Mr. Guterres would be presented with a new challenge of a different kind: Donald Trump. Last week, reacting to the decision by the Obama administration not to veto the resolution condemning Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, a resolution passed 14-0 in the 15-member Security Council with American abstention, a miffed Mr. Trump trashed the UN as “just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.” A not-so-veiled threat followed: “As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th.” That is when Mr. Trump officially succeeds President Obama as U.S. Pres...

Talks between the Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, and the underground Naga leaders which concluded to-day [January 5, New Delhi] have been described by both sides as “a serious effort to narrow the differences”. Neither the spokesman of the Government of India nor Mr. Z. Ramyo, who spoke for the Nagas, would elaborate on this statement. Both sides stated that the talks were “free and frank”. The spokesman of the Government of India said that the two sides “agreed to think over what has been discussed.”

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif, for all practical purposes, recently threatened Israel with a retaliatory nuclear attack, in response to a fake news report that the Israelis had said they would use nuclear weapons against Pakistan if it sent ground troops to Syria. Earlier, a man fired an assault rifle in a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. after reading online that it was involved in a child trafficking ring linked to Hillary Clinton. In India, a fake story said there was a GPS tracking chip embedded in the new Rs.2,000 note. Fake news — the deliberate creation of factually incorrect content to mislead people for some gain — is becoming an increasingly serious problem. And tackling it is imperative in a perpetually wired and click-happy world. Everyone with an Internet connection and a social media presence is now a content generator. Access to the web at all times on mobile platforms has raised expectations for real-time news and constant entertainment, and competition...

kistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif, for all practical purposes, recently threatened Israel with a retaliatory nuclear attack, in response to a fake news report that the Israelis had said they would use nuclear weapons against Pakistan if it sent ground troops to Syria. Earlier, a man fired an assault rifle in a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. after reading online that it was involved in a child trafficking ring linked to Hillary Clinton. In India, a fake story said there was a GPS tracking chip embedded in the new Rs.2,000 note. Fake news — the deliberate creation of factually incorrect content to mislead people for some gain — is becoming an increasingly serious problem. And tackling it is imperative in a perpetually wired and click-happy world. Everyone with an Internet connection and a social media presence is now a content generator. Access to the web at all times on mobile platforms has raised expectations for real-time news and constant entertainment, and competition a...

The eighth meeting of the Goods and Services Tax Council failed yet again to reach a consensus on the critical issue of dual control, a major roadblock in the finalisation of the draft GST laws, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Wednesday. The Council will meet again on January 16. Mr. Jaitley, briefing reporters on the two-day meeting, said he expected both direct and indirect tax collections at the end of the year to exceed the budget estimates. After the first day of the meeting on Tuesday, several State Finance Ministers said the April 1 deadline for the rollout of GST looked unlikely, with the likelihood of a July or September rollout increasing. “The legal drafts of the draft laws with gaps have been sent for legal vetting and will be presented before the GST Council,” Mr. Jaitley said. “The gaps refer to two broad areas. The first is the definition of the word ‘territory’, and the second has to do with the issue of dual control and cross empowerment. “The te...

As one of the world’s largest rural connectivity endeavours, the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project has been the subject of immense policy interest for the potential it holds to deliver high speed broadband internet to rural India. The building of infrastructure on a scale of this kind was acknowledged as an audacious move owing to the nature of transformation that this could herald in the way rural India could ride the digital information highway. The project, however, has been subject to numerous delays and deadline extensions for its completion are now a matter of routine. The pilot projects for NOFN were rolled out in the year 2012 in three States—Tripura, Rajasthan, and Andhra Pradesh—and they received functional internet connectivity from 2013 onwards. This study visits the three pilot project sites to find out how the NOFN infrastructure is faring three years after it was first rolled out to 58 gram panchayats (village local bodies) in India. Adopting a qualitative ...

While the stories of women wrestlers may well help create a more equal society, they are often satisfying ends to what at the outset was driven by pure love of sport Ever since Sushil Kumar won a bronze medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, wrestling has, without doubt, grown by leaps and bounds. A series of successes followed, from Yogeshwar Dutt to the Phogat sisters to Sakshi Malik. What was until then a sport predominantly of the hinterlands received wider recognition as television and newspapers began discovering it. Now, it has reached a stage where Sakshi’s Olympic bronze is expected to do to women’s wrestling what Sushil’s did to wrestling in general. Even to the uninitiated, the sport’s rich moral, philosophical and mystical heritage — with links first to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata through the likes of Hanuman and Bhima, and then to the Mughals and Maratha kings, who were huge patrons of the sport — has always appealed. Also, independent India’s first individual O...

.the BCCI brought about its own downfall, aided by nothing more than its hubris and cavalier disregard for the laws of the land The world’s most successful secret society has been given a lesson in transparency and that is cause for celebration. No tears need be wasted on the panjandrums who have been running the Board of Control for Cricket in India and its State associations like personal fiefdoms. The Supreme Court finally reeled in the long rope it had given the BCCI, and so tripped up its senior officials. If there was contrition among the officials, these remained unexpressed. Yesterday’s powerhouses will be tomorrow’s forgotten men, their frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command erased forever. Inevitably, some good men will be thrown out with the bad, and there will be much churning as the old order makes way for the new. The saner elements of the board will wonder if it had to come to this, when, with greater maturity and common sense, the BCCI might have emer...

This week, a divided Supreme Court placed before us two visions of the public sphere, pitting the ideal of the universal citizen against citizen-electors situated within their social contexts Do fair elections require that certain kinds of statements — such as appeals to religion, caste, and language — be taken off the campaigning table altogether? Can the state prevent adult citizens from being exposed to certain ideas before they vote? Can a court decide that only certain kinds of interests count in a democracy? Does secularism mandate the complete exclusion of religion from the public sphere? And must identities based upon religion, caste, and language always be treated as evils to be fought and eradicated? Or can they sometimes become sites of emancipation, markers around which citizens organise themselves and seek liberation through the attainment of political power? A landmark judgment These questions, fundamental to understanding the foundations of our republic, were ans...

The so-called post-truth society is not primarily the result of our inability to focus on facts; it is due to our failure to read stories deeply Say the word ‘thinking’, and the image evoked is that of abstract ideas, facts, numbers and data. But what if I say that this is our first and most common error about the nature of thinking? As religions have always known, human thinking is conducted primarily in stories, not facts or numbers. Human beings might be the only living animals that can think in stories. Facts and information of some sort exist for a deer and a wolf too, but fiction, and thinking in fiction? Now, stories are celebrated for many things: as repositories of folk knowledge or accumulated wisdom, as relief from the human condition, as entertainment, as enabling some cognitivist processes, even as the best way to get yourself and your children to fall asleep! But all this misses the main point about stories: they are the most common, most pervasive, and probably th...

On January 2, in an order that surprised no one except perhaps the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the Supreme Court set the record and the status of Indian cricket’s governing body straight. Widely expected yet unprecedented, the court took the BCCI and its top leadership to task, removing the president, Anurag Thakur, and the secretary, Ajay Shirke, from their respective positions. Accepting the Justice Lodha Committee’s concerns set out in the earlier status reports, the court reaffirmed its July 18, 2016 verdict, signalling the end of cricket administration as we have known it. Price of non-compliance Effective immediately, any BCCI and State associations’ official must be eligible as per the Lodha Committee’s eligibility criteria. The senior-most eligible vice-president will be the interim president of the BCCI, and the joint secretary will be the interim secretary for the next two weeks. The court also appointed two senior advocates to propose names for a commi...

The idea behind the Chipko movement originated in early 1970s from Mandal, a village in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand. Forty-three years later, Down To Earth travelled to Chamoli and Tehri Garhwal and spoke to the participants of this movement about its relevance today

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...

The State Bank of India’s decision to cut its marginal cost of funds based lending rate (MCLR) by 90 basis points is a timely nudge to borrowers, especially given the sharp slowdown in credit growth in the current fiscal year. The timing of the cut is not surprising, given that the country’s largest commercial lender is awash with funds held in current and savings account (CASA) deposits following the Centre’s decision to withdraw high-value banknotes and impose withdrawal curbs on account-holders. With demand across sectors having taken a knock in the wake of the resultant cash crunch, the SBI’s decision to reduce borrowing costs is likely to spur some credit-fuelled buying including in sectors such as automobiles. Latest data from the Reserve Bank of India show that growth in bank credit decelerated to 1.2 per cent in the April 1-December 9, 2016 period, compared with the 6.2 per cent pace witnessed in the comparable period in 2015. Deposit growth, on the other hand, almost doubled ...

The Supreme Court has grappled with the question whether a provision in electoral law that makes it a corrupt practice to use religion, race, caste or language as a ground for canvassing votes in an election is a bar limited to the groups to which candidates or their rivals belong, or whether it is a general prohibition on sectarian appeals. Section 123(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, as amended in 1961, gave rise to this doubt. By a four-three majority, a seven-member Bench has ruled that it is a general prohibition on the use of religion or any other communal or sectarian value in the electoral arena. The minority favoured limiting the ambit of the sub-section to cover only candidates who sought votes on such grounds, or the rivals they wanted the voters not to back on similar grounds. That secularism is the bedrock of our democracy is undisputed. That the electoral process ought not to permit appeals to the electorate on these narrow grounds is equally beyond doub...