-Hindustan Times But the danger of allowing ingress to nationally critical sectors, like telecommunications, to countries that are not friendly must now be a matter of immediate national concern The debate on whether or not to censor information has been going on for centuries. The term ‘censor’ in Roman times originally referred to the function of special magistrates assigned to supervise public morals and, so long as this remained the remit, the...

-The Indian Express A balanced approach can reduce petrol price without affecting revenues. RBI mustn’t artificially shore up rupee The Brent crude oil price has changed from around $68/barrel in January to $70/barrel on November 9, touching a high of $86 on October 3. The rupee has also fallen from Rs 63.30 per US$ in January to Rs 70 on November 9. These fluctuations have created major policy problems for the...

-The Indian Express The request for information has consistently increased from just eight in the first six months of 2013 to 16,580 in the first half of 2018. While the Government has steadily decreased its requests for content to be taken off Facebook, there has been a surge in its requests for “information” and “user accounts”. Since 2015, there has been an estimated 63% increase in Facebook accounts in India and...

-The Indian Express On October 30, at the meeting of the Financial Stability and Development Council chaired by Jaitley and attended by Urjit Patel among others, the central bank is learnt to have downplayed the issue of liquidity crunch. While the Reserve Bank of India said two weeks ago that there is no sign of a liquidity crunch, its own latest data shows that banks’ credit outstanding to the Micro, Small and...

-The Indian Express The low training participation was mostly due to financial barriers and time constraints, with each category cited by a third of youth respondents. Seventy per cent of youth are unaware of government-run skill development programmes in their area, yet more than seventy per cent are very interested in pursuing skills training, according to a “Young India and Work” study by the Observer Research Foundation and World Economic Forum. The findings,...