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Over the last couple of months, the Bombay High Court and the Madras High Court have passed important judgements that should hopefully reduce the trauma that survivors of rape have to undergo to terminate their pregnancy, especially beyond the period of 20 weeks as stipulated under the Medical Terminated Pregnancy (MTP) Act, 1971.

It is no secret that the BJP’s hand is behind attempt to topple Congress-JD(S) coalition government in Karnataka. Even as the Congress and JD(S) MLAs were resigning in Karnataka, reports came from Panaji that 10 of 15 Congress MLAS in Goa are joining the BJP. The ruling party at the Centre has been playing a dangerous game by toppling duly-elected Congress governments in the states. There are reports that similar attempts have been made to oust governments in Congress-ruled Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

If you’ve read anything about climate change over the past year, you’ve probably heard about the IPCC report that gives a 12-year deadline for limiting climate change catastrophe. But for many parts of the world, climate change already is a catastrophe.

During the faceoff earlier this year between India and Pakistan over a terrorist attack that killed more than 40 Indian paramilitaries in Kashmir, New Delhi made an existential threat to Islamabad. The weapon was not India’s considerable nuclear arsenal, but one still capable of inflicting ruinous destruction: water.

For the Bengalis in Assam – both Hindu and Muslim – the year 2019 is proving to be a veritable annus horibilis, a terrible year. The final list of National Register of Citizens (NRC) is going to be published on July 31. In two lists – the second was an addition to the first and main one – nearly 41.09 lakh Bengali citizens have been left out of the NRC.

Three years from now, let us be optimistic to begin with, farmers’ income will be doubled, or else our prime minister will dub us a ‘professional pessimist’. However, the irony is, ever since Modi had announced this flagship programme agriculture sector is suffering steep decline. The Gross Value Added (GVA) at basic prices declined from 8 per cent in 2015-16, to 7.9 in 2016-17, 6.9 in 2017-18, and 6.6 in 2018-19. The fall gives way to ‘pessimism’ and creates strong doubt about the success of this programme.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It has been an unremitting tale of neglect for Kerala in Union Budget ever since the Modi government came to power. The latest Budget is no exception to the ‘rule’!

While presenting her budget in Parliament, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tried to reason out her move to carry the budget papers in a red cloth. Red cloth otherwise has been pariah for the saffron as it symbolized Marxism for them. But here it was something different. It signified Hindu accounting process. In the old days, Hindu merchants, traders and business would wrap their accounts papers in red cloth and preceding they would worship goddess Laxmi for attaining more prosperity and wealth.

If Karnataka, with Bangalore as the IT capital of India, has banned workers’ strikes in IT industry, Tamil Nadu, with Chennai as the ‘Detroit of India’, now bans strikes in auto components industries. These so-called advanced states impose such strike bans by declaring them as ‘public utilities’ in a gross misuse of a provision in the Industrial Disputes Act (ID Act) that empowers them to ban strikes in notified public utilities. Going one step further, the State of Gujarat has even amended the ID Act itself to enhance its powers to ban strikes for one year followed by two successive years in any industry notified as public utility, though the original ID Act provides for such a ban only for six months.

BHOPAL: Three developments in Madhya Pradesh have damaged the prestige of the Bhartiya Janata Party. They are: 1. Decision of the state government to place the report of judicial commission headed by Justice (Retd.) N. K. Jain about some alleged malpractices by Kailash Vijayvargiya, BJP national general secretary when he was mayor of Indore; 2. Disclosure about the obscene acts of a senior BJP leader, and 3. Revelation in the economic survey that Madhya Pradesh continues to be a BIMARU state.