Earlier this week, a seven-judge Bench of the Supreme Court ruled that MPs and MLAs are not immune to criminal prosecution on bribery charges related to their votes or speech in Parliament or state assemblies. This judgement overturns an earlier ruling of the Supreme Court in the 1998 Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) case. In this case, the majority opinion had held that MPs and MLAs enjoyed immunity from prosecution with regard to how they vote or speak in the House. Article 105 (2) of the Constitu...
Mar 08, 2024•27 min
The Surrogacy (Regulation) Act was passed in 2021, but over two years later, it continues to be mired in some amount of confusion and on-going cases in the Supreme Court. Brought in to ban commercial surrogacy, it allows only for altruistic surrogacy under certain conditions, and aims to regulate surrogacy clinics, part of the huge infertility health sector in the country. Last month, the Central government brought in a modification to the surrogacy rules – it allowed married couples to use dono...
Mar 07, 2024•27 min
Ever since the English cricket team arrived in India, ‘Bazball’ is on the lips of every cricket buff. It is a unique style of play that paid rich dividends for the English team --until the India tour. England is trailing the five-match Test series 1-3, and there is a lot of debate around whether ‘Bazball’ has been overhyped, and if England has failed to adapt it to Indian conditions. What are the elements of Bazball? How did it develop? Has India finally exposed its limitations? Learn more about...
Mar 06, 2024•25 min
Engineered cross-voting to win extra seats in the Rajya Sabha and organized defection to bring down duly-elected State Governments appear to have been normalized in Indian politics. The additional two seats that accrued to the BJP in Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh recently is a case in point. Though six cross-voting MLAs have been disqualified in Himachal Pradesh, the defeat of senior lawyer Abhishek Manu Sanghvi points to the dangers that lie ahead for the Congress government in the state. ...
Mar 05, 2024•24 min
From time to time, stories of the commercial dealings in organs, or cash for kidney scams, surface in the media. In December, one such possible organ racket was in the news, involving people from Myanmar, who had come to a private hospital in Delhi for transplant procedures. Organ transplants have been taking place in India since the 1970s, and after multiple instances of the commercial sale of organs, India brought in the Transplantation of Human Organ and Tissues Act, 1994. This law banned the...
Mar 04, 2024•31 min
It’s now exactly two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. According to President Volodymyr Zelensky, so far 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have perished in the war. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced. The population in territories under Kyiv’s control has shrunk from 52 million to 30 million while the country’s economy has been devastated. As for Russia, after initial setbacks – likely caused by an underestimation of Ukraine’s capacity for resistance – it has modified its tactics and settled i...
Mar 01, 2024•34 min
Housing is a basic requirement for dignity of life. But affordable decent housing remains a distant dream for most Indians, especially in urban India. Close to 17% of all households in urban India live in slums, with this percentage shooting up to 41% in a city like Mumbai and 29% in Chennai. Over the years, the government has taken many initiatives to address this problem, with schemes such as Indira Awas Yojana, and the ongoing Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), an interest subsidy scheme for ...
Feb 29, 2024•55 min
Most of us are familiar with the plastic waste crisis and public awareness campaigns on the need to recycle plastic. Now a new report by the Centre for Climate Integrity, an international non-profit, says that plastic producers have been lying to the public for more than 30 years – it says that they knew all along that plastic recycling was not a viable solution, either technically or economically, and yet kept they promoting it to protect their interests. How serious is the plastic waste proble...
Feb 28, 2024•40 min
The headline in a recent article was arresting – India fears losing out to China in smartphone exports race. Another broke the news that Mexico had overtaken China for the first time in 20 years as the largest exporter to the US. One more said – loud and clear at t that – that India should realise that Vietnam, and not China, was the major competitor. There are a few dots we can connect to see a common thread in all these that should interest us – The world wants to move away from China but that...
Feb 27, 2024•30 min
Farmers are back at the barricades, this time they have been stopped by the Haryana police at the Punjab-Haryana border. Twenty-two-year-old Shubhkaran Singh has died in the protests. Farmer leaders have suspended their protest till February 29 when they will announce their next course of action. The agitating farmers are firm that there should be a legal guarantee for MSP purchases but the Centre has, instead, come up with a five-year contract to purchase pulses, maize and cotton from farmers. ...
Feb 26, 2024•26 min
Controlling a computer with just your thoughts seems to be something straight out of a science fiction movie, but that’s exactly what scientific experiments are now doing. This week Elon Musk, founder of the startup Neuralink which implanted a brain chip, called Telepathy, into a human being last month, said that the patient’s progress has been good, and the patient is now able to move a mouse on a screen by just thinking. Exciting? Yes. A little scary too? Perhaps. The tech, at least for now, i...
Feb 21, 2024•25 min
The Lok Sabha elections of 2024 are round the corner. The season of defections is also upon us. Party hopping has commenced in earnest. An India Today poll suggested earlier in February that the NDA would win 335 seats in 2024 down from 353 in 2019. The Congress tally was put at 71. A YouGov-Mint-CPR survey, also published in February, said that 51 per cent believed that construction of the Ram Mandir, on the site where the Babri Masjid once stood, was a rectification of historical wrongs while ...
Feb 19, 2024•25 min
A five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously struck down the Centre’s electoral bond scheme. Electoral bonds enabled anonymous political donations, which the apex court has termed as “unconstitutional”. It stated categorically that the scheme violates the right to information under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. What was the reasoning behind for this verdict, and what are its implications for Indian democracy going forward? Guest: Jagdeep S Chhokar from the...
Feb 16, 2024•33 min
The Uttarakhand assembly passed the State’s Uniform Civil Code last week. Titled ‘The Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand, 2024’, the Bill was one of the BJP’s poll promises during the 2022 Assembly election campaign. Although its applicability is supposed to be uniform, the law exempts tribal populations, and also the Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) from its purview. What’s the legal history and background of this legislation? How does this law affect minority communities? And what’s controversy aro...
Feb 14, 2024•45 min
The Union Finance Ministry has come out with a ‘White Paper’ on the changes in the Indian economy in the past 20 years. In the 58-page document, which it presented in Parliament, the government compares the 10 years of UPA-rule from 2004 to 2014 with 10 years of NDA rule from 2014 to 2024. It claims that the NDA government in 2014 inherited a “deeply damaged economy” marked by “governance, economic and fiscal crises”. It further claims that the in the past 10 years, the NDA government has “turne...
Feb 13, 2024•39 min
The people of Pakistan have spoken. They have reposed their faith in democracy and cast their vote against the establishment’s efforts to decimate the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Independents backed by his party, PTI as it’s known, have won 93 seats in a House of 264, with the Muslim League Nawaz notching up 75. The Pakistan People’s Party has won 54 seats. It looks likely that a coalition government will take power in the country. Talks have begun betwee...
Feb 12, 2024•27 min
For anyone who drives a vehicle in this country, the nightmare scenario is the same: an accident involving another person. India has one of the worst road accident rates in the world – in 2022, the country reported over 4,60,000 road accidents, with over half taking place on national and State highways. Clearly, road safety is an area of huge concern. Recently, new provisions related to hit-and-run accident cases were brought in under the new penal code, the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita or BNS. These ...
Feb 09, 2024•24 min
India and Iran have deep cultural and historical connections. But relations between the two nations have atrophied in recent times. US sanctions on Iran have been a big factor, leading to India largely curtailing its engagements with the country. But recent developments – visa-free travel for Indians, and Iran’s entry into BRICS -- seem to provide reason for cautious optimism. What are the key concerns and objectives for Iran and for India when it comes to bilateral engagement? To what extent do...
Feb 08, 2024•55 min
The RBI has imposed major restrictions on the operations of Paytm Payments Bank Ltd (PPBL). It has directed Paytm Payments Bank to stop accepting deposits or top-ups in customer accounts, wallets, FASTags, and other instruments after February 29. An RBI circular stated that this action follows an audit report and a compliance validation report by external auditors, which revealed “persistent non-compliances and continued material supervisory concerns in the bank, warranting further supervisory a...
Feb 07, 2024•37 min
If you or your child has a bad cough, the first thing you’ll probably do is reach for a cough syrup. It’s easy, it's available over the counter and there’s no fuss about taking it. But does it work? Is it at all effective to help your cough go away? Last year, a panel of the US Food and Drug Administration came to the agreement that phenylephrine, a common ingredient used in a number of cough and cold medicines is completely ineffective. Health bodies across the world emphasise that over-the-cou...
Feb 06, 2024•26 min
Pakistan goes to the polls on the 8th of February to elect members of what will be its 16th lower House or National Assembly. The polls come just as former Prime Minister Imran Khan has been convicted in two successive cases and stands debarred from contesting elections. His party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf, or PTI as it is known, is fighting with its back to the wall. Pakistan Muslim League leader Nawaz Sharif fancies his chances of becoming Prime Minister for an unprecedented fourth term. ...
Feb 02, 2024•28 min
In the past few weeks, there has been a surge of complaints from passengers about Digiyatra. Their main complaint is about security personnel and airport staff collecting their biometrics for the app, using coercion and deception. According to travellers, CISF personnel at the entry gates were asking them to scan their boarding pass and capturing their photos, and then enrolling them in the Digi Yatra app without even informing them. The element of coercion is especially startling as the Ministr...
Feb 01, 2024•48 min
This is a crossover episode On February 1, the BJP-led government will place its Interim Budget in Parliament, seeking a vote on account. Has the NDA government’s economic performance in its second term fared better than its first? Here we discuss the question. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 31, 2024•1 hr 8 min
The Australian Open likes to call itself ‘the Happy Slam’ and this year’s edition sure turned out to be a happy one for India. Rohan Bopanna became a Men’s Doubles Grand Slam champion for the first time and claimed the World No. 1 ranking at the age of 43. In Men’s Singles, Sumit Nagal made it to the main draw after coming through three qualifying rounds and scored an upset victory over 31st seed Alexander Bublik in the first round – the first time in nearly 40 years that an Indian has beaten a ...
Jan 30, 2024•25 min
This year’s Annual Status of Education Report or ASER, ‘Beyond Basics’, surveyed over 34,000 young people aged between 14 and 18, in 28 districts across the country, to get an inkling into: what are the young people of India currently doing? What are their basic maths and reading abilities like? And how do they navigate the digital world through smartphone use? The results were perhaps not very surprising given that ASER, which is brought out by the NGO Pratham, has been flagging concerns about ...
Jan 29, 2024•27 min
India’s public distribution system – its ration shops – through which subsidised food grains are distributed to the poor is the largest such welfare programme in the world. It is a lifeline that saves millions from hunger. But for the past few years, the Union government has been running pilot projects where fortified rice --- rice enhanced with iron and vitamins – is being distributed instead of natural grains. The reason given by the government for this switch is that it will reduce anaemia in...
Jan 26, 2024•53 min
What began on October 7 as a conflict between Israel and Hamas seems to be spreading across the entire region. Even after 100 days of a conflict that has already claimed the lives of more than 25,000 people, Israel’s military assault on Gaza continues. But this war has sprouted many secondary plot-lines: Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shia group backed by Iran, has been exchanging fire with the Israeli military. Shia groups that serve as Iran’s proxies have been attacking US and Israeli assets in ...
Jan 22, 2024•34 min
A new paper released by the NITI Aayog has claimed that multidimensional poverty (MDI) has declined from 29.17% in 2013-14 to 11.28% in 2022-23, and that 24.82 crore people “escaped” from multidimensional poverty during this 9-year period. Titled ‘Multidimensional Poverty in India since 2005-06: A Discussion Paper’, the NITI Aayog report claims that India is well on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 1.2) of “halving multidimensional poverty” by 2030. The report also claims t...
Jan 19, 2024•27 min
Having a loved one in intensive care at a hospital is an experience many of us have gone through, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a stressful time, what with the strain of a relative being ill, the decisions you may have to take, and the costs you have to tackle. What should ICU care look like in India? The Union Health Ministry recently released a list of guidelines that list out criteria for ICU admissions and discharges, the role of intensivists or critical care specialists in th...
Jan 18, 2024•27 min
Relations between India and Maldives seem to have hit a rough patch. First came some controversial remarks from Maldivian politicians on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lakshadweep visit, prompting a ‘boycott Maldives’ campaign on Indian social media. Then came a joint press communiqué with China, which committed to “elevating strategic cooperation” between Maldives and China. This was followed by remarks from Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu, on his return from China, that although Maldives was...
Jan 17, 2024•25 min
