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The resounding victory of the Congress Party in the Karnataka assembly elections less than a year before the holding of the Lok Sabha polls in April/May 2024 has given a big boost to the Party and its leaders the Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi. For the Grand Old Party, this win was absolutely needed for establishing its credentials as the party which on its own can defeat the BJP in one of the big states. Since the 2019 parliamentary elections, the Congress lost all assembly elections excepting Himachal which is a small state. That way, the big victory in Karnataka can be considered much more than a morale booster for the Party.

It is unfortunate that manufacturing is losing focus in India while all eyes are on so-called rapid growth of the services sector. Advertising and marketing campaigns have been peaking to impress consumers as well as investors while the manufacturing sector continues to struggle silently for growth. Barring in the areas of defence manufacturing and electronics, there are not many reports of new greenfield units coming up to expand the country’s manufacturing base. India’s so-called $1.2-trillion plan to snatch factories from China looks like a daydream. Investors — domestic and foreign — are not showing enough enthusiasm about deploying large sums in manufacturing despite its big growth potential in the world’s most populous country. In India, manufacturing accounts for 78 percent of total industrial output. Logically, the country’s economic growth should be linked with its manufacturing growth. But, it is not happening to the extent it must.

New Delhi: Ace drag flicker Harmanpreet Singh will lead the 24-member hockey team in the next leg of the FIH Pro League in Europe starting 26th May. Prolific midfielder Hardik Singh has been named vice captain.

‘What a wonderful world’ must have been the feeling in the Aam Aadmi Party after it won the Jalandhar bye-election by a devastating margin, which has been the Aam Aadmi Party’s signature calling card election after election. ‘Landslide’ is AAP’s default position. Twice (thrice?) in a row in Delhi, then in Punjab, and now in the Jalandhar bye-election!

Losing the Karnataka assembly election literally has been a visceral shock for Narendra Modi. He did not ever imagine that his politics of Hindutva would loose its appeal and fail to enamour the common Kannadigas.

Concerns loomed large on India’s neutral stand on Russian invasion of Ukraine for its separation from the US led global market and eventually backlash on its growth. In contrast, the situation took a reverse gear. India, not only sustained the growth, but is expecting the hegemony in the global growth in 2023. According to IMF’s World Economic Outlook, global growth was forecasted to slow down to 3.2 percent in 2022, from 6 percent in 2021 and slip further to 1.3 percent in 2023. In contrast, India is expected to achieve 7 percent growth in GDP in 2023, which could be the highest in the world, surpassing China.

Window dressing is going places. It has travelled from the confines of the books of accounts to the ranks of the saffron brigade in West Bengal which have been allegedly inflated to impress the BJP top brass, according to sources in state BJP.

Although a Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP) government has been re-elected in Tripura winning a second term early this year, centre/state talks on the separate tribal statehood demand remain stalled. Despite earlier announcements made by top leaders in the state capital Agartala, about GOI’s move to facilitate a dialogue between the BJP and the resurgent Tipra Motha(TM) tribal party through an interlocutor, there has been little forward movement.

Implementation of the four labour codes in the current financial year 2023-24 has well neigh been stalled. BJP’s debacle in Karnataka Vidhan Sabha election, the result of which came out on May 13, has changed the priorities of the party and RSS, where they have just seen how their narrative has failed along with Modi’s so called charisma as vote catcher.

Declining real wages of workers beginning from 2017 in India, exacerbated during the pandemic in 2020, continued worsening due to high inflation throughout 2022, seems to deteriorate further in 2023 on account of downturn in the domestic and global economy.