-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...

-Livemint.com Since education policies and government programmes have greater implications for the socially marginalized, they should be open to public scrutiny and debate Anurag Behar’s article on the new educational policy 'A plea to educators at the cusp of a seminal shift in education' on 12 August in Livemint raises some very important and serious concerns and is therefore, deserving of attention. It points to a growing rift between framers of the...

-The Hindu In doing so, we risk the disengagement of those most invested in preserving our democratic institutions Ethical explorations often begin with emotional injury. Something simply feels wrong, and you ask yourself whether you are missing an important bit of information or the right perspective. This happened when I read the Supreme Court judgment pronouncing senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan guilty of criminal contempt for his two “scurrilous” tweets. I have known...

-TheNewsMinute.com Kerala has become a state fueled by a remittance economy, but the origins of this, dates back to several decades. In the summer of 1980, I visited Kerala’s Varkala in Thiruvanathapuram for the first time. It was the peak of the first Gulf boom. The media was full of stories on the ones who had made it big. But I was doing an article on the petrodollar paupers — the ignored...

-The Indian Express Hardline conservationists fail to see possibilities of people-wildlife coexistence The COVID-19 pandemic has driven migrant workers back to their villages, including many situated inside or on the fringes of forested areas, including sanctuaries and national parks. Even as they seek to remake livelihoods there, a new battle has emerged between the forest department (FD) and these local communities. It pertains to the declaration of a Critical Wildlife Habitat (CWH),...