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NEW DELHI: The Jnanpith Selection Board has announced the recipients of the 56th & 57th Jnanpith Awards for the year 2021 and 2022 on Tuesday in a meeting. The 56th Jnanpith Award for the year 2021 went to NILMANI PHOOKAN, eminent Indian poet writing in Assamese and the 57th Jnanpith Award for the year 2022 went to DAMODAR MAUZO, eminent Indian author writing in Konkani.

Smriti Irani kept you hooked to the TV screen, as an actor, and later in Parliament, as an orator. Now she has engaged her admirers with her debut novel, a thriller. At home, Irani has plotted a thriller. Readers keep a wary eye on the office of the Union minister for women and child development.

Modi government’s policies for the development of the country are highly defective, since it works for the rich and against the poor, driving inequality to make India among the most unequal countries of the World. Top 10 per cent of the affluent elite are earning on an average twenty times more than the bottom 50 per cent of the population with an average earning of merely little less than Rs 149 per day.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The return of Kodiyeri Balakrishnan as the secretary of the Kerala CPI(M) is the best thing that has happened to the party, which is plagued by a plethora of problems.

Will the Congress Party perish as West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and others believe? Even in the past, many had predicted the end of Congress, but it had survived many onslaughts. The latest was in 1998 when Sonia Gandhi emerged Sphinx-like to revive it and rule from 2004- 2014. The 2014 Lok Sabha results gave the Congress 12 crore votes, though seat-wise, it got only 52. Even in its second successive defeat in 2019, the party retained a solid block of 20 percent votes. The Gandhi family is complacent, believing that the voters will get disenchanted with Narendra Modi sooner than later and return to the Grand Old Party. No doubt they live in a fool’s paradise as there is an urgent need to revive the party. Undoubtedly, the Congress Party faces a leadership crisis and challenges from many sides.

On December 1, the Special National Investigation Agency (NIA) Court in Mumbai rejected the plea of Anand Teltumbde, who was seeking temporary bail of 15 days to meet his mother and family after the recent death of his brother Milind Teltumbde in an alleged encounter with the security forces. Anand Teltumbde is an accused in the Bhima Koregoan violence and conspiracy case and is currently lodged in Toloja jail as an undertrial prisoner.

A number of Tamil filmmaker are telling Dalit stories anew these days, what has changed here is the perpetrator –not the traditional upper caste landlord –it is the state. The state is the people’s opponent, using a colonial, outdated instrument of oppression, the police.

The climate crisis has forced the global community to debate over viable alternatives to the fossil fuels about which there is consensus that these are major cause of carbon generation responsible for climate crisis. There is also consensus on that renewable resources are the best alternative to the fossil fuels. But there is no such consensus on the use of Nuclear energy for power generation as it is fraught with several dangers. All this was evident in the debates in the COP26 at Glasgow. Yet in some parts of the world nuclear power is being fancied for this task. Therefore the news of the first nuclear power plant in north India in Gorakhpur village near Fatehabad in Haryana is to be read with caution.

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958’s killing spree continues, begging the question for the nth time whether it isn’t long overdue for its removal lock, stock and barrel? Thirteen Naga civilians cannot reply to that question. They were in coffins wrapped in colourful linen, killed in a “botched” army operation in a Nagaland district bordering Myanmar on December 4, 2021.

The cryptocurrency and regulation of official digital currency bill 2021 is awaiting introduction during the current winter session even as Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in Parliament that the government has no proposal to recognise Bitcoin as a currency in the country. She also informed the House that the government does not collect data on Bitcoin transactions. Privately, however, cryptocurrency is very much in circulation in India as it is in many other economies across the world. No one really knows if it is being tracked by the government. The Supreme Court of India already overturned the ban on Bitcoin imposed by the Reserve Bank in 2017. The apex court struck down the restriction in March 2020.The court ruled that the ban was in violation of the freedom of business and profession under Article 19(1)(g) of the Indian Constitution. Thereon, cryptocurrency continues to be operated in the country in a legal vacuum.