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Tamil Nadu once again looks headed for a straight fight in the main between the two battle-hardened Dravidian majors, ruling AIADMK of Chief Minister Jayalalithaa and the DMK of Mr Karunanidhi (93), which has been rebuilding its image in the aftermath of its quota of scams.

The Congress losing the by election to the Harlakhi assembly seat to the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) a constituent of the NDA has diverse interpretation for different political parties and alliances. While for the NDA, its constituent retaining the seat implied “a referendum on the functioning of the Nitish Kumar government, it is certainly not a major political development for the grand alliance and its leader Nitish Kumar. Nevertheless the secular alliance suffered the jolt just about three months after its stunning victory in the state assembly election.

With the elections just a few weeks away, the picture in West Bengal is getting clearer by the day with the Congress and the Left getting ready for a tactical tie-up to defeat the ruling Trinamool Congress. The idea is to extend it to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls if this succeeds. It is indeed a gamble whether a Left Front-Congress alliance will be able to deliver the desired result.

LUCKNOW: Ahead of assembly polls due early next year, ruling Samajwadi Party appears to be in serious trouble by losing two out of three by-elections results of which were declared on Tuesday.

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.