Airports are local monopolies, for the most part. Who gets to operate them and on what terms matter to the public at large. Sure, there is a regulator, the Aeronautic Economic Regulatory Authority of India to regulate aeronautical and other charges at any given airport.
Earlier this month, Sam Altman of OpenAI declared Code Red at the company: the latest version of its chatbot was underperforming Google’s latest offering, Gemini 3. That panic had one simple explanation: he believes artificial intelligence (AI) to be yet another technology service in which the winner takes all.
When a sudden rent increase forces a thriving commercial establishment — that has a century-old legacy and is a hallmark of a historic locality — to shut shop, is there any sensible alternative to the mournful death of a chunk of the city’s living tradition?
I have a vivid memory of a gleeful and beaming laugh of the great statesman and leader, former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was born on this day in 1924 in Gwalior. An affable personality, Vajpayee would express his love for Mithila’s Rohu and his appreciation for Maithili language.
The government is considering allowing e-commerce companies with foreign direct investment to hold inventory, strictly for the purpose of exports. This is welcome. The government should go ahead and convert the proposal into policy action.
The Adani group is entering the battery energy storage system business, with an initial planned capacity of 1.126GW of power, capable of delivering that power for around three hours. This solves two kinds of problems, but creates two larger ones, of supply-chain dependence on China and significant indirect emissions of the kind green energy is supposed to avoid.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi gets it wrong on Macaulay. Give the devil his due. His introduction of English language education in India is one of the good things colonialism did for India. It paved the way for Indians to enter the world of modern knowledge, to savour the fruits of the scientific revolution that swept across Europe and turned the world of scholarship upside down in the 16th and 17th centuries, and for the oppressed castes of India to enter the world of learning, from which Indian tradition had excluded them, and for the enrichment and growth of India’s regional languages and cultures. English education introduced Indians to the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity, totally alien to monarchy and the caste system.