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RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan has predictably announced a 25 basis point cut in the key policy rate (repo), lowering it to 6.5 per cent, and has buttressed it with significant liquidity management measures designed to improve credit transmission by banks and “magnify the effects of the current policy rate cut”.

On April 1, Bihar joined the group of states practising complete or partial prohibition. On this date the state enforced partial prohibition particularly in the rural areas of the state. The partial ban would not cover the sale of Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL), which would be available in 656 shops within urban limits, but not in rural areas, of the state’s 38 districts. In the first phase, the ban would become operative in the rural areas. This will affect the local brewers.

Once asked what qualities a politician required, Britain’s former Prime Minister Winston Churchill had said “The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen”.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind. So goes a biblical saying. That is exactly the fate which has fallen the Congress High Command in the sordid Congress candidate selection episode in Kerala.

The mood of Assam’s majority of 1.98 crore voters in the two phased assembly elections is increasingly turning in favour of a change. Nearly octogenarian Congress Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi is up against a formidable BJP-led coalition that has two old hardcore rightist regional parties, though somewhat rival, Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and Bodo People’s Front (BPF), as allies. Fifteen years of Congress rule in Assam has done little to develop the resources-rich important north-eastern state into an economic powerhouse that can assure stable jobs for the state’s growing number of educated youth. Assam, like six other neighbouring states in India’s remotest region, has remained neglected despite the existence of a lot of untapped economic resources and proximity to important developing countries in the east such as Myanmar, Bangladesh and those in the Indo-China region.

A recent poll survey appears to be right in its predictions about the winners in West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. But it is the losers who are also likely to attract considerable attention.

Entering its third fiscal year, the Modi Government has been at pains to demonstrate its undiminished reforming zeal and cataloguing a whole range of policy endeavours of last two years in several directions to lift up a still stagnant economy awaiting signals of revival at the start of the new fiscal year (2016-17).

The BJP should not follow the Congress path and, if it does, will also be doomed like the grand old party. Since the inauguration of the republic, central governments have misused Article 356 for partial advantage of the ruling party. However, under Indira Gandhi, the provision became an important tool to shape the political system to suit her agenda. The similarity between her and current regime should not be missed. Both brook no opposition, do not necessarily respect institutional propriety, and act, as if, they are here to stay forever.

The Nitish Kumar government holds that since the knowledge rules the world hence it is desirable to make the future generation knowledgeable and to accomplish the task, the government is keen on imparting quality education to students, right from primary to university level.

The just concluded India Aviation Show 2016 at Hyderabad has made it clear that time has come for India to take off in the civil and military aviation business leaving behind many countries.