In the wake of one of the worst train accidents last Friday at Balasore, Odisha, journalists have turned an unsparing spotlight on rail safety. Many unsavoury features of Indian Railways now stand exposed in the glare of public scrutiny, ranging from the systematic underfunding of the rail safety fund and the snail -pace rollout of the rail safety mechanism, Kavach, to the damning CAG report on train derailments, and the sorry state of the Railways' finances.
It is a terrible tragedy that more than 280 people have died and 900-odd injured in twin rail accidents in Odisha’s Balasore district. The Chennai-bound Coromandel Express ran headlong into a stationary goods train at Bahanaga station, Balasore, tearing away and throwing bogeys on to the parallel track, directly in the path of the oncoming Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express, creating a second collision. This happened at 7 pm on June 2. Rescue work started fairly soon – that is the only good part of the story.
The way to make AT1 bonds attractive again is to clarify the insurance-linked role that sets them apart from pure debt, revert to valuation as per the time period of call options, and vastly improve banking supervision via enhanced management of banking data.
Monday’s cartoon by EP Unny in the Indian Express compares the geometry of the new Parliament building with that of Jantar Mantar, for long the national capital’s favourite protest site. The juxtaposition is more than appropriate, given the recent developments. Even as the new Parliament building was being inaugurated, women wrestlers and their supporters protesting against alleged sexual harassment were roughed up and their protest site at Jantar Mantar cleared.
Indian agriculture is a gamble on the Monsoon. This cliché would have been sufficient ground for the Goods and Services Tax authorities to slap a tax of 28 per cent on the value of crop output if agriculture had not been kept out of the ambit of GST.
FANS of philologist JRR Tolkien and his lore would be familiar with Anduril and Palantir as, respectively, a magical sword and a crystal ball that shows things afar, including in the past. But Anduril and Palantir hitting the headlines are not magical relics of yore, but defence companies that came up from America’s technology startup ecosystem to develop high-tech military capability, and figure among the defence startups proving their spurs in the war in Ukraine.