News Minute

As far as court judgments go, those often don't make sense to an ordinary reader. And not without reason, for they are often mired in dense legalese, or the subjects of the orders themselves don't matter a bit to ordinary people—there's a disconnect somewhere. Moreover, writings about such nebulous subjects often get lost in translation (from legalese to simple language). The Supreme Court judgment of May 13, refusing to decriminalise defamation, is one such instance. Much of the debate on the...

Making post-result analyses of elections can be great fun. With the advantage of hindsight, all you need to do is Google up a bit, and speak to ten people. And, you can easily land up with vacuous, click-bait lists such as: Ten reasons why Mamata made a comeback, 13 facts about Mamata's landslide victory, Six things you should know about the Left debacle in West Bengal, and so on. Precious few of them would answer the elementary question: why did the majority of the people in West Bengal vote...

The pomp and glitz surrounding the launch of Reliance Jio's 4G services on Monday was all-pervading. It would have one believe that the company, part of the Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) conglomerate, had done something revolutionary. But then, it hadn't. Neither had it introduced a new technology, and nor launched an innovation. It had only annnounced the rollout of its 4G telecom services, something that rival Bharti Airtel had done way back in February 2014. The promotional blitzkrieg...

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) always gets it left, right and centre when it comes to governance. And, if good governance were to be about participatory democracy, the BBMP would be reckoned to be an abject failure. For over 20 years, various ruling dispensations in the state had virtually ignored the Constitution (74th Amendment) Act, 1992, which devolves power to basic units of governance in cities and towns called ward committees. The result was a lack of transparency in civic...

The issue of splitting up the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) into smaller corporations, under some pretext or the other, has cropped up on a number of occasions in recent times. Only that, this time it's more than an academic exercise – a split definitely seems quite on the cards. What is, however, ironic in the ongoing babble over the pros and cons of a possible trifurcation of the BBMP is that many have changed opinions as times have changed. In January 2013, at a seminar on...

If financial health is to be taken as the bottomline, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has been lying comatose for a while, kept alive only by alternately conniving and obliging state governments irrespective of political ideologies. The BBMP is a financial disaster for many reasons, the prime among them being the tendency to live beyond its means, not mopping up enough revenue for itself, and, of course, rampant corruption at all levels of the corporation. It has only been doing...

The Karnataka Chief Minister has been insistent that the state capital has grown too big in numbers, and, is therefore unmanageable. It is this reason that Siddaramaiah has been propping up as the official explanation to split up the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). Bengaluru has definitely grown, and is a big mess in itself. The BBMP is currently the largest municipal corporation in the country with an area of 712.54 sq km under it. With a population of 8,443,675 according to the 2011...

It's now open season in Bengaluru after the Karnataka High Court ruling that the state government and the State Election Commission (SEC) will get a maximum of six months to hold elections for the reconstitution of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) which was dissolved last week. A Division Bench of the high court, comprising Chief Justice DH Waghela and Justice Ram Mohan Reddy, on Friday delivered the verdict while setting aside an earlier single-judge order asking the government and...

The Bharatiya Janata Party's notable performance in the elections to Assam's urban local bodies (ULBs) held earlier this month has been described as a "sweep" by some, as a "surge" by certain others. The truth, as is often the case when hyperbole is used to describe electoral performances, is the casualty here. For, the truth lies elsewhere. The BJP's accomplishment was good, quite impressive. But winning less than 50 per cent of the seats and just about half of the ULBs can hardly be described...

The media has gone to town with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor, Raghuram Rajan's mention of Adolf Hitler and "strong" governments in his speech on 'Democracy, Inclusion, and Prosperity' at the DD Kosambi Ideas Festival held on February 20 in Goa. What many have been gloating about is that the RBI governor was essentially taking potshots at the Prime Minister with the insinuations. The two paragraphs that have been circulating on social media would certainly seem so, especially if one...