The United Nations General Assembly recognized November 20, 1954 as Universal Children’s Day to promote and celebrate the rights of children. On this day in 1959, the UN adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child and in 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. While the day is celebrated with a lot of enthusiasm worldwide, let’s go beyond ceremonies today and t
In October, during yet another of his visits to Gujarat, prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a curious range of projects in Vadodara: a transport hub and multi-level parking facility as well as a waste-to-energy plant of the municipal corporation. If there were no elections coming closer, it would have been the mayor who would’ve cut the ribbon. This, amid a rush of launching several
Traditionally, finance has been ‘global’ in character. Over the centuries, frequent changes of regimes, combined with evolution of administrative systems, have restricted free movement of capital and discouraged free markets. With the passage of time, free trade almost became imaginary. Financial integration among industrialised nations was fast-tracked in the last t
One year has passed since the Modi regime applied shock therapy to improve the functioning of the Indian economy through demonetisation on November 8, 2016. Thus, legal tender to rupee notes worth 1,000 and 500 denominations was withdrawn and 86 percent of the currency went out of circulation. It was claimed that the policy was designed to fight black money, counterfeit currency, corruption and
A slowdown in the Indian economy and jobless growth have made the future seem bleak for many young Indians. Pronab Sen, country director of the International Growth Centre’s central team for India, speaks to Governance Now about what led to this pass and gives his prognosis. Sen has served as the first chief statistician of India, served as the functional and technical head of the nat
The Nobel Prize in economics of 2010 that went to Peter Diamond and colleagues. Their work on search costs in labour markets provided the theoretical justification for government-operated employment exchanges. The 2012 Nobel Prize that went to Alvin E Roth and Lloyd S Shapley took things even further: their work demonstrated that design is important, because equity markets provide clear analysi
Back in the 1980s, television viewers were familiar with the multicolour, barcode-like strips that used to appear on our screens when transmission used to go off. That was probably the only colourful moment on TV at that time. At a time when Krishi Darshan and Chhayageet used to greet viewers through the sole terrestrial state-owned network Doordarshan, they did not have much of a choice. Or, r
After a series of consultations with various groups in Jammu and Kashmir during his visit of the state last week, the union government’s designated interlocutor and former intelligence bureau (IB) chief Dineshwar Sharma returned to Delhi and is briefing the union home ministry this week about the developments. And there are enough straws in the wind to suggest that Sharma&r
Post-demonetisation, there has been a crackdown on shell companies, a way to convert black money into white. Recently, prime minister Narendra Modi said that shell companies would all be eliminated in five years. Pradeep Lankapalli, who heads information and data analytics firm Thomson Reuters, however, believes we might not have to wait so long. In conversation with Governance Now, he talk
When prime minister Narendra Modi, accompanied by his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe, was about to board his official plane to visit Varanasi about two years ago, he got a call from the then French president Francois Hollande. Hollande wanted to tell him about the progress in the ongoing Paris climate summit, known as COP 21. Modi said he would call him back after reaching Varanasi. Later, Mod
Constitutionally, health and education are seen as rights resting on an equivalent platform: both are part of the fundamental right to life under Article 21, both are vested as a duty upon the state under the directive principles of state policy and basic access to both is intrinsically linked to every person’s right as a citizen of India. However, the implementation of both the rights ha
In the final analysis almost all of politics and most of economics are connected to three critical human needs: food, clothing and shelter. In India we know it quite intimately having seeped deep into our popular culture as roti, kapda and makaan. Of course, in India as in several other countries, the three human needs are also liberally interspersed with all sorts of cultural norms, religious
M Karunanidhi alias Kalaignar dons the hat of an outstanding scriptwriter of Tamil cinema besides being a formidable politician and Dravida Munnetra Kazhgam (DMK) chief. Yet he would have found it difficult to anticipate the turn of events that took place in Chennai recently. Prime minister Narendra Modi not only visited the ageing patriarch of Tamil politics and but also stumped
In a conversation with Governance Now, UP Singh explains why the holy river cannot be cleansed in one stroke or by a single scheme. He also talks about how Ganga is different from other rivers across the globe and therefore needs a different mechanism to purify it again. When would we get to see a clean Ganga? Cleaning Ganga is not a one-time, but
There is no drop in revenue but a dip in the growth rate of the revenue from telecom services because of reduction in tariff by telecom service providers due to competition. In an interview with Governance Now, TRAI head RS Sharma explains how the revenues will pick up soon. Countering the argument that the telecom industry is becoming an oligopoly market with the concentration of power in
As the regent of the Tibetan government in exile, Lobsang Sangay is campaigning hard for its autonomy. He is bitter about the Chinese government’s attitude. In a freewheeling interview with Shankar Kumar, which took place a few days before the China Communist Party’s 19th Congress in Beijing, the Tibetan leader talks about world peace, Doklam, OBOR, Rohingyas and other issues. E
When prime minister Narendra Modi laid emphasis on internal democracy within political parties during a Diwali Milan interaction with the media in Delhi, he was merely echoing the sentiments of Syama Prasad Mookherjee, the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the progenitor of the BJP. In 1950, two years before the formation of the BJS, Mookherjee wrote a “programme f
The United Nations General Assembly has designated October 31 as World Cities Day, which has the general theme - Better City, Better Life. It is a well known fact that by 2030 nearly 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities. In India where presently nearly 32 percent of the population is living in urban areas, over the next two decades nearly 300 milli
Nikhil Sachan is one of the most promising names among contemporary Hindi writers. His first book, Namak Swadanusar, a collection of short stories published in 2013, was praised widely in literary circles. It also made it to BBC Hindi’s top 10 books of the year. Born in Kanpur, he studied engineering from IIT BHU and completed a management course from IIM Kozhikode. After another anth
Achal Khare, MD, National High Speed Rail Corporation, is a man with big responsibility – of realising India’s dream of running a bullet train. In conversation with Vishwas Dass, Khare lists various challenges before the NHSRCL – the executing agency of the Ahmedabad-Mumbai high speed rail (HSR) project – and
