WITH the US imposing technology sanctions on China, the world’s electronics industry is facing turbulent times. After the sanctions, Huawei has slipped from its number one slot as a mobile phone supplier (2nd quarter 2020) to number seven currently. Commenting…

THE Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change (MoEFCC) last week filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court conveying that it has now given the go-ahead for seven controversial hydro-electric projects in the Upper Ganga region of Uttarakhand.  These…

THE union government recently approved a new, poorly conceived Rs11,040 crore National Mission on Edible Oils-Oil Palm (NMEO-OP) with an ecologically damaging focus on oil palm plantations in the North-East and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, presumably due…

THE New York Times (NYT) has recently published an article (September 14, 2021) detailing how politics overrode science in India's deadly second wave. It is based on the struggle of a young scientist, Dr Anup Agarwal, who sought to warn the top scientific…

THE recent Quad leaders meeting in the White House on September 24 appears to have shifted focus away from its original framing as a security dialogue between four countries, the US, India, Japan and Australia. Instead, the US seems to be moving much closer…

FACEBOOK is in the limelight for both the right reasons and the wrong reasons. The wrong reason is that, what was supposed to be a small configuration change took Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp down for a few hours last week. It affected billions of users…

THE Modi government has created an artificial electricity shortage during the festival season, which normally sees a high electricity demand. With the opening of the economy post-Covid-19 second wave, power demands were expected to pick up in October. This…

THE coal crisis in the country led to a significant shortfall of power generation, especially in the Northern region leading to hours of load shedding. However, certain private power producers like Adani Power made windfall profits. Facing blackouts, some…

AS delegations from 192 countries head to Glasgow for the 26th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), it is important to underline some of the key issues before the global south as a whole, including India…

LAST week, Zuckerberg at Connect 2021 launched a new company brand Meta. According to Facebook, "...brings together our apps and technologies under one new company brand. Meta's focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities…

WELL into the second week of COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, the climate summit is shrouded in a dense fog of uncertainty, confusion and broken or empty promises, while activists both inside as observers and outside fume and fret in sheer frustration. As the…

COP26 came to a close on November 13, nearly 24 hours after originally scheduled. The final plenary got stuck at the final draft of the COP statement, now named Glasgow Climate Pact. For hours, viewers of the live telecast saw country after country making…

FIGHTING global warming is not just providing a path to net-zero carbon emissions for all countries. It is also about how to meet the energy needs of the people while doing so. If fossil fuels are to be given up as they need to be, countries in Africa and…

OMICRON, a new SARS-CoV-2 strain, first detected in the Gauteng province of South Africa, has been acknowledged by WHO as a “variant of concern”. Already, cases have been reported from other countries, making clear that Omicron is unlikely to be contained…

THE world is far more interconnected than ever before, with 60 per cent of the world’s population connecting to the internet. With wireless connectivity and cheap smartphones, the number of Indians connecting to the internet today is more than 70 per cent…

THERE is much discussion these days on whether to introduce booster shots in India, both generally in response to the Covid pandemic and in the specific context of the Omicron variant of the virus. So far, recommendations for boosters by many experts are…

OMICRON, a new SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern, has rapidly overtaken all other variants in the new waves of Covid-19 cases that are emerging in South Africa, the UK, the European Union and the US. More worrying is that Omicron is able to infect those who have…

THE current crisis in Europe of spiralling gas prices, coupled with a cold snap, brings out that the transition of any part of the world to green energy is not going to be easy. It also brings out the complexity in such a transition, that energy is not simply…

THE verdict on Ellen Holmes, the CEO of Theranos, who was tried for fraud, was guilty. Theranos was a company set up by Holmes and her former partner Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani and had promised to revolutionise testing. Their advanced biotech equipment—they claimed—would…

FROM the very beginning when the Covid-19 pandemic struck India in early 2020, many questions have arisen about decision-making by the union government on Covid control measures, especially about the extent to which measures instituted have been based on…