-The Hindu Opposition members question government’s commitment to democratic norms The Lok Sabha on Monday passed three Bills in 20 minutes as disruption by Opposition members over the Pegasus snooping controversy and the farms continued into the last week of the monsoon session of Parliament. The government also introduced three Bills in the din, prompting Congress leaders Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and Manish Tewari to question the government’s commitment to democratic norms. RSP’s N.K. Premachandran...

-TheWire.in We must change the parameters we use to judge the "productivity" of parliament. My first few days in the Rajya Sabha were tumultuous enough to realise that classics like Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice, the bible of Westminster, would really have to be ‘tropicalised’ a lot to adjust to the gross realities of the world’s largest and beleaguered democracy. The small endoscopic view of parliament’s functioning also leads to the belief that...

-Livemint.com Development—healthcare, jobs, education—inevitably lowers the total fertility rate Give me a rupee for every time I have heard “demographic advantage" applied to India in the last several years, and I’d be sitting on a small fortune. Invariably, the mentions are tinged with pride, as if we’ve suddenly transformed into a commendably and overwhelmingly young nation. Truth is, we used to be even younger and are getting steadily older. But that’s a story...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...

-Down to Earth The need of the hour is to put halt large hydel-Power projects in the Himalayas. Can small hydroPower plants offer a sustainable solution? HydroPower is a renewable and non-polluting source of energy. India has an economically exploitable and viable hydroPower potential, which is estimated to be about 84,000 megawatt at 60 per cent load factor. It has an installed capacity of 148,701 MW, according to the National Hydroelectric Power...