Opinions

The Union government is increasingly bulldozing through policies and Bills – in a tearing hurry. The latest, following on the heels of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2012 and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Bill, 2014, is the National Tourism Policy (NTP). The Union tourism ministry put up a draft of the policy on its website on April 30, and gave the general public only 10 days to respond. The policy may be unveiled as early as May 15...

No matter how hard you try not to fume at antics of Indian television reporters, you will invariably fail. They are, bar the sane exceptions that are becoming fewer by the day, decidedly callous, unabashed, unrepentant, and ignorant. They don’t learn, they don’t do an ethical job of it, and they strut around arrogantly giving you the impression that they are answerable to none. Actually, they are not. Except to their respective managements whose raison d'être is to make money, and it does not...

If a Union Budget is supposed to be not just a document of numbers, but a precursor to the shape of policy initiatives to come, then the 2015-16 Budget presented by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley needs to be seen as a recipe for unmitigated disaster. There is nothing wrong with a government that calls for economic growth; after all, everyone wants to have a better life. But when policy initiatives pave the way for a flagrant and unrepentant exploitation of natural resources and turns a Nelson’s...

In 2006, the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) published a damning report on the presence of banned pesticides in colas. The Indian media, by and large, went easy on the two cola brands – Pepsi and Coca-Cola. The allegation was serious and the implications far and wide. Yet, the cola companies, the opulent advertisers that they are, tided over the crisis with consummate ease. One of the many reasons for this was that news media establishments steadfastly refused to push...

Memories of last year’s Uttarakhand catastrophe are a tad difficult to push under the rubble of amnesia. For the last few days, incessant rains have been wreaking havoc in districts like Champawat, Chamoli and Nainital. Landslides too have been reported from many places. A bridge that had been constructed after the 2013 Uttarakhand disaster has been washed away. It is not without reason that memories of the other day keep rushing back. The superficial reportage of the ongoing rains is there...

There are many reasons why journalists are such a scantly-respected lot today, compared to even what we were when I joined the profession 23 winters back. One being that journalism, increasingly so, has ceased to be about people. The decline, steeply – if I may insist, started in the 1990s when most journalists lost the plot, when the ‘demos’ part of the democracy began disappearing from news pegs. What has been lost in the bargain has been vibrancy, truth. Spins imparted by journalists, apart...

In a milieu where bedlam and mutual suspicion hold discourse to ransom, it is difficult not only to find voices of sanity, it is as challenging to remain circumspect oneself. One invariably ends up believing not the truth, but what suits one’s own predilections and narratives. It is this unsettling milieu that reigns supreme in the country today, and in such a frenzied backdrop comes a shoddily-drafted document that unabashedly spins a conspiracy yarn so fantastic that one would gleefully accept...

Tuesday last brought this rather alarming and disconcerting bit of news that global warming is threatening more deadly Everest-kind of avalanches. The scare was attributed to the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). But as it turns out, it was sheer scare-mongering, and quite baseless and impetuous at that. The ICIMOD report, Glacier Status in Nepal and Decadal Change from 1980 to 2010 Based on Landsat Data, had in fact made no such assertion or...

The anti-corruption protests of 2011, if not anything, were an outpouring of anger that people harbour against politicians. Probably, more against the regime that ruled India at the time. The agitation, that spawned the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), was simplistic to the point of being infantile. The anti-politician hysteria that was whipped up by KB ‘Anna’ Hazare deftly dodged core issues: it did not delve into the very definition of corruption, it sidestepped the assertion that corruption is all...

It’s one thing for the corrupt and the indolent to circumvent the system. It’s quite another when the government itself subverts processes to serve vested interests. But that is just what the Indian government has done with small hydel projects, or SHPs for short. And few know about it too. Hydel projects, big or small, are just that – hydel projects. The only difference between a big and small one is the scale; everything else – from the concept to the issue of environmental impact – is the...