-TheWire.in Parties across the spectrum seem unwilling to take the issue seriously, experts and civil society experts say. Hyderabad: While Telangana chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) has touted Hyderabad as a ‘global city’, the capital was hit by flash floods earlier this week and has remained cut off from the rest of the world after major roads were washed away. Experts have attributed this turn of events to poor urban planning,...

-The Hindu Public places and spaces cannot be occupied indefinitely, says Bench The Supreme Court on Tuesday held the protests led by scores of mothers, children and senior citizens of Shaheen Bagh against the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act by blockading a public road in the national capital were “not acceptable”. A Bench led by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said public places and spaces could not be occupied indefinitely. The court recognised that peaceful protests...

-Livemint.com * Market participation is meaningless without information. Should every Indian farmer get a smartphone? * Without Internet connectivity and market intelligence, the transaction cost associated with selling in places outside the local market are higher than the value of the produce FATEHPUR: Kamlakant is a smallholder farmer in Daulatiyapur village of Fatehpur district in Uttar Pradesh. He is an enthusiastic vegetable cultivator and every season, he searches for answers to three basic...

-The Hindu Evidence of significant disparity in access to online schooling during COVID-19 Schools across the country have now been closed for six months due to COVID-19, but this means vastly different things for different people. For the child in urban Himachal Pradesh, where Internet penetration is higher than 70%, it likely means online schooling, Zoom classes and digital textbooks. For the child in rural Odisha, where less than 6% of households...

-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the persistent digital divide afflicting rural India owing to poor and insufficient Internet connectivity. With the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech acknowledging the need ‘to complete’ Internet connectivity to villages, there is a renewed vigour and interest in the National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN)/BharatNet project. An important question to pose when translating policy to project is: when should...