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The electoral prospects of the Congress in Assam have improved in the last three months. To put it differently, the party has considerably overcome the state of disorganizational crisis it was in. For the first time, grassroots level booth committees are being formed and local leadership is being groomed. The party has taken fresh initiatives to reach out to the tea garden workers, one of the traditional vote banks of the Congress. The INTUC leadership had started taking the tea workers for granted and were getting isolated from them. This is changing.

India as the chairman of the BRICS group, will pursue a pro-active economic collaboration strategy to improve the economies of the five members of the group - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, at the coming summit in New Delhi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi who made a major impact at the 2015 summit at Ufa in Russia by elaborating on his plans about speeding up the process of cooperation among the members in the context of the global financial crisis, is working on a renovative programme which will take care of the immediate issues confronting the BRICS members.

It is regrettable that even nearly 70 years after independence healthcare is appalling and the country is struggling to apportion 2 per cent of GDP for the critical sector in the budget. Statistics are none too comfortable. India still has world's largest number of women dying in child birth; the world's highest deaths of children under the age of five; a health system that ranks 112 among 190 countries; one doctor for 1,700 people; 21 per cent of the world's burden for disease, worsened by poor basic health and sanitation.

Will the logjam on government formation in Jammu and Kashmir be broken? Are the BJP and PDP which the late Mufti Mohammed Sayeed had, immediately after being sworn in as chief minister on March 1, described as coming together of “the North Pole and South pole”, drifting apart?

There should be no doubt that all major parties to the Syrian conflict remain committed to a military solution and that the political process is a cruel facade that offers Syrians no reprieve from the cataclysm. What is most disgraceful is the USA which is the creator of the current crisis in Syria has now raised its hands in despair. It has completely failed its legions under its thumb. The situation in the region would not have deteriorated to such an extent pushing the global fraternity on the brink of world war if the USA had not created the Frankenstein, the ISIS.

Swiss firm Nestle’s Maggi noodles may be back on retailers’ racks across the country, following national testing labs and Bombay high court clearances, but it now appears to be the turn of other MNCs to face Maggi-manipulated muddle with the Uttar Pradesh government’s food safety department reportedly coming down heavily on similar products by much bigger MNCs such as Unilever and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). UP’s Barabanki district food safety officer Sanjay Singh found noodle samples of Knorr Soupy, Horlicks Foodles and Ching’s Hot Garlic variety carrying ‘ash content’ well beyond the prescribed limits after they were tested positive in the government’s food analysis lab in Lucknow. The companies may face the same fate as Nestle in the coming months if similar inspections and raids are also conducted in other parts of the country. Adversely, if these raids and tests end up in a fiasco, they will bring bad name to the food safety regulator and impact the Modi government’s ‘Make-in-India’ drive.

The similarity between what took place in Hyderabad central university last month and is happening now in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is obvious.

In the Railway Budget 2016-17 to be presented by the Union Minister of Railways Suresh Prabhu on February 25, 2016 in Parliament, people of India expect various reforms to be announced with a resolute commitment to implement them for capacity expansion, improvement in passenger amenities where no measures announced so far have worked to the satisfaction of rail users, further measures for resource mobilization to implement the 7th Pay Commission awards, how to save Indian Railways from impending debt trap, lukewarm response of private investment in the railways, meeting challenges of a balance between railways social responsibility and commercial viability, and some other imperative challenges facing the railways to save it from corporatization.

Our van hurtled down the serpentine road from the Hastagiri peak, one of the three peaks in Bhavnagar district, after two hours in the octagonal Jain temple complex under construction for four decades. The marble complex is grand with the main temple for Rishabha Dev, the first Tirthankara and the founder teacher of Jainism at the top. It is spread out over half a million square feet area with three stories of Jain temples of marble.

Historically, we are pretty accustomed to seeing Indian awards and controversies go hand in hand. Come January, there would be absolute chaos once the padma awards are announced. Well, this year was no different, the awards did not fail to surprise us and they did live up to their innate reputation of being diabolical. So, have Indian awards lost credibility? Did they ever have it in the first place? I personally believe that it would be only fair to comment once we scrutinize the award process from layman’s perspective.