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AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa might have won a historic battle reversing the yo-yo pattern of win by DMK and AIADMK, the two Dravidian parties, in assembly elections in southern state of Tamil Nadu since 1989. But one cannot undermine the performance of rising sun, the symbol of DMK. For the first time the election campaign was single handedly managed by the DMK superemo M Karunanidhi's rising son M K Stalin, who ensured the party, which touched its nadir in popularity after the 2G spectrum scam, was revived to become a major regional political force again in the state which has 39 Lok Sabha seats and 234 assembly seats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be having substantial discussions with the United States President Barack Obama during his visit to Washington on June 7 and 8. This first bilateral visit by the Indian PM to the USA, will be an opportunity for the Indian side to review the progress made by the two governments in the areas of economy, energy, defence, environment and security. President Obama is in the last leg of his tenure with only less than eight months left .But he is becoming more assertive in his last year in office taking a number of bold and innovative decisions. Indian side is also expecting from the outgoing President a pro-active approach in imparting a strategic dimension to the India-US political and bilateral relations.

Ever since the “news broke” that all references to Indian Union's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had been omitted from the Class VIII textbooks of the Rajasthan state board curriculum, there has been a huge hue and cry. Syllabus content, especially those of non-science subjects, has always been a bone of contention where various political forces have wanted to introduce changes based on their conception of what students should know more of and more crucially, what students should know less of.

The excitement after the five state Assembly polls is slowly dying down after the newly elected chief ministers have taken oath. Mamata Banerjee (West Bengal) and Jayalalithaa (Tamil Nadu) have retained their fiefdom. The other three have become chief ministers for the first time. It will be an acid test for the new Assam chief minister Sabrananda Sonowal to perform. Kerala chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has to keep the Left flag flying. Similarly the Puducherry chief minister V. Narayanaswamy brings cheers to the Congress, which is almost in ICU.

Curiously, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the nation neither a cogent account of his Government’s two-year record of ‘vikas’, by way of outcomes toward the ‘achhe din’ he had promised in 2014, nor did he hold out any early promise of meeting job and such aspirations of the people who had voted for him.

THIRUVANTHAPURAM: Hardly a week in office, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) Government, which got off to a good start, has kicked up a controversy.

The Centre has formally recanted the gazette notification of May 18 by the Agriculture Ministry to cap the license fee for all new genetically modified (GM) seed technologies which sought to regulate bilateral pact between seed technology providers and licensees. Some of the provisions of the May 18 notification were deemed draconian by the GM seed/crop technology holders and their cohorts in India, particularly those in the BT. cotton industry and trade.

The Supreme Court of India has revived from death the specter of a common medical entrance examination for all medical colleges. Ostensibly, this common entrance examination called National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) is to create a level playing field.

BHOPAL: Two sudden and dramatic developments have landed Madhya Pradesh government in a highly difficult position. The two developments are – one, a controversial Facebook message by a district collector Ajay Gangwar lauding the contribution by Jawaharlal Nehru and two, brutal murder of a practicing lawyer and his brother.

A debt bomb is ticking against the Indian Railways, which if not taken care of on a war footing, has the potential to drown this behemoth under a never-ending debt trap. According to a RTI reply to journalist Shashikant Sushant, the Ministry of Railways has said that as on December 31, 2015, the debt burden from domestic market borrowings through its financial arms, Indian Railways Finance Corporation (IRFC) was Rs. 82,961 crore, Rs.37, 309 crore tied up from multilateral sources like World Bank, Asian Development Bank and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and Rs. 150,000 crore from Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). This viewed together with Rs.100, 000 crore tied up with Japan for building 500 kilometer long Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed bullet train over the next six years, comes to a total gargantuan sum of Rs.370, 270 crore. This considered in the light of a massive investment of Rs.8.5 lakh crore proposed by the NDA Government under the stewardship of Railway Minister, Suresh Prabhu over the next five years, is indeed a debt trap for Indian Railways.