-Hindustan Times The World Bank should ensure “greater transparency and accountability” while factoring in subjective opinion-based indices as inputs for its World Governance Indicators (WGI) that has significant weightage in sovereign ratings, the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) said in a series of tweets citing an internal working paper, and called for independent Indian think tanks to bring out similar perception-based indices for the world in order to...

-Hindustan Times Successive governments have “completely destroyed” the independence of the Election Commission of India (ECI) by ensuring no chief election commissioner (CEC) gets the full six-year term to head the poll body since 1996, a Constitution bench in the Supreme Court lamented on Tuesday, adding that absence of a law for appointment of election commissioners (ECs) has resulted in an “alarming trend”. The five-judge bench further remarked that the silence of...

-Hindustan Times In their plea, former bureaucrats MG Devasahayam, Somasundar Burra, and Aditi Mehta referred to the Registration of Electors Rules that allow the Registration Officer to entertain any objection, hold a summary inquiry and rectify any errors without hearing or notifying the affected party. The Supreme Court has directed the Centre and the Election Commission of India (ECI) to respond in four weeks to public interest litigation (PIL) challenging the rule...

-Hindustan Times India on Thursday communicated strong objections to discussions under a special UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) effort known as the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture, which has sought to expand efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouses gases to the agriculture sector. According to people aware of the matter, a draft decision under the Koronivia Joint Work mentions mitigation – the efforts to reduce emissions – multiple times. “Noted that...

-Hindustan Times On November 15, Boston-based health news website Stat News cited official documents that purported to detail a series of problems in how Bharat Biotech’s coronavirus vaccine, funded partly by the government, was approved. The Union government and vaccine maker Bharat Biotech on Thursday refuted a report that alleged rules and protocols were bent during the approval process for Covaxin, but the clarifications served to further add to the questions that...