Opinion

In 2017, India imported 4.37 million barrels of oil per day, resulting in an annual oil import bill of $109 billion. Ninety nine per cent of petrol and seventy per cent of diesel in the country are used by the transport sector. Thus, transitioning to electric vehicles is a critical component of the larger transition to sustainable energy systems. India's electric car stock, however, was merely 5,000 in 2016 compared to around half a million in China. The policy action has also not targeted the drivers of market development.

It takes just one bad decision to undo a lot of good work. That decision was taken recently by the Central Adoption Resource Authority - India's nodal adoption body - when it chose to bar partners in live-in relationships from adopting children, on the grounds that unmarried couples cannot provide a stable home for a child.

Half the truth is often a whole lie. This adage seems particularly significant in light of the survey undertaken by an inter-ministerial task force to ascertain the number of manual scavengers in India at present. The report has revealed a four-fold rise in the numbers since 2017. 

Poor service

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New friends

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Welcome step

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Parting shot

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The deaths of Shujaat Bukhari and Gauri Lankesh have different local histories and a few all-India similarities. Lankesh and Bukhari were both journalists who had worked for what passes as the national English press before committing themselves to publications principally aimed at readerships in their states. After a career working for The Times of India and later Sunday, Lankesh took over her father's magazine, Lankesh Patrike, and then went on to edit the Gauri Lankesh Patrike, while Bukhari moved from being a correspondent with The Hindu to founding Rising Kashmir, an English newspaper based in Srinagar.

Myths surrounding mathematics can multiply fears, add anxieties and subtract happiness

Party problemsMixed bagGreat dividePicture perfectHealth benefits

Digital predators

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Flawed idea

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Deadly bolt

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Bitter fruit

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Absent, sir

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Weary a bit now, wondering where Mahadeb might be, or might not; and even why he is happy to remain gone. Without notice. Without a forwarding address. Without news of when he will return, if at all. A bit like AchchheDin, if you will. It gets mentioned all the time but never seems to be at hand. Weary now of expecting and nothing coming off it but more expectation. The promise of them, and the utter refusal of their fulfilment. And the absolute lack or absence of any explanation over why what was promised is not here. AchchheDin. Mahadeb. They were pledged to us. They turned out to be empty pledges, walked over, betrayed. Nothing happened. Happens. Happens all the time and all too often that nothing actually happens. If you know enough of life, you will know that happens. The promising, and the unthinking violation of it. As if nothing happened. As if it were your fault you believed a promise. But it was, wasn't it? Who asked you to? You utter fool, you believing fool.

The green, rolling hills, serene lakes and pine-scented mist were so reminiscent of home that the British referred to picturesque Shillong as the Scotland of the East. Centuries later, when it acquired statehood in 1972, the erstwhile Khasi-Jaintia hills and Garo hills districts of Assam were aptly named Meghalaya, the abode of clouds.