-The Hindu As the U.S. loses interest in multilateralism in trade, India should actively try to arrest the organisation’s slide Less than 25 years after the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created, its future as a body overseeing multilateral trade rules is in doubt. The failure of the recent ministerial meeting at Buenos Aires is only symptomatic of a decline in its importance. Too ambitious? When the WTO was born in 1995, replacing the...

-Hindustan Times/ Livemint.com TRAI in its new recommendations has backed the core principles of Net Neutrality. India’s telecom regulator has backed the basic principles of an open and free internet in its recommendations on net neutrality, a term which means people should get equal access to the internet and broadband providers should not favour any apps and services. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s guidelines released on Tuesday say that no internet access...

-Hindustan Times While Delhi came under flak for running fewer buses than that it did three years ago and therefore failing to enforce blanket road rationing, compliance of even basic anti-pollution measures was impossible in the NCR because of poor infrastructure. The Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) mandated by the Supreme Court to counter air pollution was meant to be an effort in regional cooperation. The entire National Capital Region (NCR), which...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to Basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...

-The New Indian Express NEW DELHI: Amid controversial reports of hunger deaths in Jharkhand due to PDS beneficiaries being turned away, economist Jean Dreze says that even official records show that a significant proportion of people are being deprived of food rations every month. In an interview with New Sunday Express, the prime mover behind the NREGA welfare scheme said “this does not mean that Aadhaar is solely responsible for the failures...