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It is highly admirable that India’s public sector oil giants — ONGC and OIL — continue to vigorously using their experience and skill to explore new oil and gas reserves within the country. Oil exploration is considered to be a big financial and technological gamble until it leads to discovery of commercially viable reserves. It is also good to see at least one private firm, Vedanta, is ready to make large on-ground investment in commercial exploitation of such proven hydrocarbon resources in India. The latest open acreage auction by the country’s upstream regulator, Directorate General of Hydrocarbon (DGH), showed overseas Indian tycoon Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta bagging 41 out of 55 oil and gas exploration blocks. Actually, Vedanta had bid for all the 55 blocks although local giant Reliance Industries (RIL) and other foreign concerns stayed away from the auction — first time since India began offering oil and gas area for exploration and production through bids in 1999.

Earthworms are worming from under the soil and committing mass suicide in Wayanad, north Kerala. The earth is getting too hot for them, say some folks, post the battering earth got from unprecedented rains and floods. There are lots of people around the world who would wish such a fate on politicians and it’s a worrying thought for politicians, from Barack Obama to Amit Shah.

Labour has changed — and for the better, MPs and trade unionists told Tony Blair on September 7 after the former prime minister launched a broadside against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The war criminal behind the invasion of Iraq lamented that Labour was “a different type of party” from the one he led. “Can it be taken back? I don’t know,” he told the BBC.

Two of the Senate’s top supporters of workers, Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren, have gone on the attack against corporate subsidies and irresponsibility. And though their legislation will go nowhere in the GOP-run 115th Congress, the two lawmakers are laying down markers for future legislative action to help workers.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The sexual harassment complaint against P K Sasi, the CPI(M) MLA representing the Shoranur constituency, has put the party in a tight spot.

On the eve of the assembly election, Rajasthan has become a political hot-pot in which both the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress are performing a tight-rope walk. Communal polarization has somewhat weakened giving way to a stronger caste polarization on the issue of reservation.

The BJP’s disconnect with Dalits is well-known. So, nobody can be faulted for seeing a sinister move in the I&B ministry’s advisory to media units not to use the term Dalit while referring to Scheduled Castes. The Dalit word has been posing the ruling establishment a challenge of unprecedented proportions, even threatening the chances for a second term for the Modi government. The word symbolised an emerging new identity for India’s oppressed people, seeking to catch up with an order that perpetrated centuries of exploitation and injustice against them.

The tenure of Justice Dipak Misra, who retires as Chief Justice of India on October 2, was mired in controversies, but he firmly stood against all the odds and had ultimately his way. The Opposition led by the Congress sought to bring an impeachment motion against Justice Misra but the motion was rejected by Rajya Sabha Chairman, Venkaiah Naidu. Naidu observed that the motion lacks substantial merit. “We cannot allow any pillars of governance to be weakened by any thought, word or action.”

Dichotomy looms on the bounce back in GDP growth in 2018-19 and its impact on job creation. Critics are puzzled that while the upturn was on account of growth in manufacturing, it has not made any proportional impact in terms of job creation.

Telangana Chief Minister, Mr K Chandrasekara Rao, a showman to claim unparalleled but untested achievements for his young State, has broken the ice for impending battles for 2019 in the South, where the Modi-led BJP has planned a major foray to earn a pan Indian presence.