-The Hindu Alarming inequality, failing health care and border tensions loom large and the economic situation needs full attention As the country prepares to enter a new financial year after an ominous and gloomy 2020-21, there are great expectations about green shoots and the shape of the economic recovery. The havoc wreaked by the novel coronavirus pandemic on people’s lives and livelihoods is deep and enormous. The impact of the COVID-19 induced...

-The Hindu India is working on a multi-pronged strategy to reduce this reliance. China still remains the largest source of critical imports for India, from mobile phone components to pharmaceutical ingredients, and India is working on a multi-pronged strategy to reduce this reliance, which is a bigger concern than the imbalance in trade. “The trade deficit is not in dollars, it is in overdependence,” said Sanjay Chadha, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of...

-The Hindu New guidelines to banks on Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act rules. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has laid down a chARTer for banks which says that “donations received in Indian rupees” by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and associations from “any foreign source even if that source is located in India at the time of such donation” should be treated as “foreign contribution”. As per the existing rules, all banks have to report...

-The Hindu The issue is about checking their monopoly power while encouraging their positive externalities and consumer surplus There are ongoing investigations worldwide, including in the European Union and the United States, on the abuse of monopolistic power by the Big Tech firms, especially Facebook and Google. Many compare this with the earlier antitrust investigations in the U.S. on the telecom industry and the break-up of the AT&T dictated by the DepARTment...

-The Hindu States such as Kerala, Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat had the highest access to the bare necessities while it was the lowest in Odisha, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Tripura. Poorer States have reduced the gap with rich States when it comes to in providing their citizens with access to the basics of daily life — housing, water, power, sanitation, cooking gas — according to a new ‘Bare Necessities Index’ (BNI) in...