OPEDS

Dead bodies floating in the Ganges and washing up ashore in neighbouring Bihar is just one in the long list of gory stories that we have been witnessing in recent weeks. Frantic calls for help from people struggling to find a hospital bed, oxygen, blood plasma, medicines and even places for cremation or burial, continue to flood social media platforms, even as the cost of saying the final goodbye becomes too steep for many. And while citizens have come together to create resource pools, sharing leads and contact numbers, cross-checking and circulating them, union health minister Harsh Vardhan claims there…

Business Standard newspaper conducts a B-school Summer Project Competition every year, sponsored by Crompton Greaves. B-schools from around the country are invited to send what they consider their ‘best summer internship project report’. As readers know, most two-year MBA programmes have a compulsory 6-8 week industry internship. This often carries a full credit or two, so students and faculty take it very seriously. Business Standard gets around 150 reports [one per school] from  B-schools spread all over India. These are reviewed by a knowledge partner and 15 of these are then selected and sent to a jury panel for review.…

The rapid spread of the COVID virus in India is worsening by the day. As is its management. Thousands are dying and lakhs are getting infected every day. Desperate cries for oxygen or a hospital bed from relatives and friends of COVID patients are flooding social media. Open the morning papers and what hits you are pictures of sick patients and their families gathering at the gates of hospitals. It has become a literal ‘life and death’ struggle. For even after death, bodies have to wait for space at cremation and burial grounds. This is definitely a war-like situation, where…

Little did Kirtee Bhai, who in a webinar had referred to ‘Delhi’ as a ‘way of governance model’ for cities, imagine that just a few months later Delhi would be would be transformed literally into a municipality. Kirtee Bhai, a member of the first urban commission constituted in 1986, was making a comparison between Delhi and Mumbai, terming the former with a legislature as a better model for city governance. A few weeks back, the central government passed an amendment in the Government of National Capital Delhi Act of 1991 (GNCTD), turning Delhi city-state into an adjunct of the central government…

It would be impossible to recount any occasion in human history when tens of millions of children were forced to stay indoors for over a year, deprived of meeting friends, playing outdoor games, attending classrooms, talking to teachers, and enjoying the fun that makes childhood so special! Human curiosity and creativity just cannot come to a sudden halt. Alternatives to confront the situation were explored. Teachers and students swiftly acquired the skills necessary to substitute — to the extent possible — the face-to-face teaching by online learning. As off-line was ruled out, online really reduced the tension and stress among…

The recent TN Assembly Elections saw the lowest voter turnout in the state in the past three elections. Chennai’s overall voter turnout stood at 59.06%, with only four constituencies registering turnout higher than 60%.What could explain the low turnout is that many eligible voters chose to sit it out on polling day and also that the inaccuracies in the voter rolls contributed to the issue. There have been instances of unexplained deletion of names of voters who found themselves unable to exercise their franchise in the assembly elections. Names of entire families who voted as recently as the Lok Sabha…

O Delhie Mahra Pahda ra dil Shimla, mahra desha ra dil, o delhie, mahre desha ra dil Shimla----A pahari dialect song sung across the Himachal, meaning: “hey Delhi, the heart of the mountains is Shimla, hey Delhi, our Nations heart is also Shimla”. The first reaction was one of joy and pride. For one who has lived there and served for five years as its deputy mayor, Shimla’s number one all-India ranking in the Ease of Living (EOL) index recently released by the union government in the less than one million population category, sounded stupendous. But it was not long…

“I hire people in spite of an MBA, not because of one”. That is Elon Musk participating in an online conference organized by Wall Street Journal. Adding insult to injury, Musk blamed the present condition of American corporates on “too many MBAs running companies”. Musk’s comments have stirred the MBA pot all over again. The debate around the relevance of today’s MBA education has been growing ever since the Lehman Brothers collapse and the collateral damage to the financial services industry globally. The MBAs were blamed for a lot of the dodgy products the hedge fund industry had been feasting on…

The road map for the next five years for devolution of funds to the states, as recommended by the 15th Finance Commission (XVFC), is ready. Tragically though, despite the many important lessons the COVID pandemic taught us, the Finance Commission’s report seems to have largely ignored these lessons. The draft XVFC recommendations totally ignore the aspirations of the states and their hopes of getting their due share. In fact, the structure of the recommendations has been made more discretionary in favour of the Centre, with little thought of the states' needs, based on fairness and equity. In fact, the report’s…

In 2019, the Indore Municipal Corporation became the first Indian city to clear around 15 lakh tonnes of historic waste at landfills using a process called bioremediation. With overflowing landfills and the difficulty of finding new waste disposal sites, Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) across the country now look at the Indore project as an example worth emulating to clear out waste dumps at landfills. Cities like Bijapur, Davanagere, Doddaballapur, and most recently, Hassan and Gokak have already invited Expressions of Interest or tenders for conducting bioremediation. While this may result in reclaiming some land from waste disposal sites, several challenges…