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INDIA, the anti-BJP alliance, seems to be going downhill in West Bengal even as next year's Lok Sabha elections are inching closer. It is difficult nay a well nigh impossible political proposition now for the three INDIA alliance partners namely Congress, CPI(M) and Trinamool Congress to find common ground in the state before Lok Sabha polls.

Dhruba Narayan Ghosh, known as D N Ghosh, the young official who played the leading role in preparing the draft of the ordinance on bank nationalisation issued on July19, 1969, passed away in Kolkata on November 6. He was 95. Originally, a member of the Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IAAS), Ghosh was the chairman of the State Bank of India from 1985 to 1989 and later as chairman of Larsen & Toubro fought and defeated the Ambanis who were bent on taking over this premier engineering and construction company of the country.

One of the ways federalism and the powers of the elected state legislatures are being undermined, is by governors sitting over the bills passed by the legislatures without taking any decision regarding them.

It is difficult to believe that there has been no listed ‘code-of-conduct’ for the directly elected representatives of Lok Sabha since the country held its first general elections between October 21, 1951 and February 21, 1952. Paradoxically though, Lok Sabha has an ethics committee with the members remaining in the dark about the things or acts that are clearly prescribed as unethical for them. The first ethics committee in Lok Sabha was constituted as late as on May 16, 2000 by the late GMC Balayogi of the Telugu Desam Party. Lok Sabha is yet to come out with a code-of-conduct for its members and a declaration of members’ business interests on the lines of those existing for Rajya Sabha members.

New Delhi: Defender Preeti was Thrusday named captain of the 18-member Indian team for the Women’s Junior World Cup to be held from 29th November to 10th December in Santiago, Chile.

The death of a horse, ironically named Voice of Reason, has erupted into widespread bemoaning what we humans are doing to the environment and our insensitivity to nature and other sentient beings.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar was the wrong guy at the wrong place. He should have been an American speaking to a house of US legislators. And to think that modern-day Indians make such a hue and cry about free speech. What about Nitish Kumar’s right to free speech? After all, what was his crime? He wasn’t lying; he only spoke what was in the book, maybe not verbatim, but the gist of the truth explained – connecting sex education with population dynamics. Spoken in a classroom, students would have asked for clarifications, adding stretches of their own imaginations, and gone on to the next class without raising ruckus like the BJP MLAs of the Bihar assembly did after Nitish Kumar taught them the nitty-gritty of population growth and sex education.

Frightened of the tremendous impact of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s state caste census on the impending Lok Sabha polls, the saffron ecosystem has come up with a plan to launch a sub-caste census well before the general election starts. This arrangement, according to a think-tank of the RSS, will snatch the initiative from Nitish and would also help win over a large section of the OBC and EBC communities who were feeling neglected.

Looking at the data and studies done across the world, it appears that the Infosys founder N Narayana Murthy when he said that in India youth should work for seventy hours a week, he was ignoring a reality: working hours in India are amongst the longest globally.

The Supreme Court’s displeasure with the way the Centre is using its agencies to suppress criticism or force adversaries into submission is finding expression at increasing frequency.