India Today Monday, April 17, 2023

India is littered with archaeological treasures. The most well-known, of course, is the Taj Mahal, whose risks of deterioration are almost as famous as the monument itself. Ajanta was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site alongside the Taj in 1983 but has yet to get similar attention. It is over a millennium older, although history-writers are still debating other primary facts about it. The consensus is, it was built in two phases, separated by seven centuries. Around the late 2nd century BC, sometime after Emperor Ashoka had spread Buddhism around India, monks cut the first six caves into those cliffs above the Waghora River. The early murals did not depict the Buddha directly. Then, circa 460 AD, Ajanta came back to life with a full renaissance-like bloom under Vakataka king…

On March 31, the day the financial year 2022-23 came to a close, Piyush Goyal, the Union minister for commerce and industry, announced the Foreign Trade Policy (FTP), 2023, for India, that outlined an ambitious plan to clock $2 trillion (Rs 164 lakh crore) in exports by 2030. Given that India’s overall exports have crossed over $765 billion (Rs 62.7 lakh crore) in FY23, the country would have to clock an average of over 14 per cent annually for the next seven years to reach that figure. Experts say that the projections look optimistic as exports grew only by around 10 per cent in FY23. They point out that though robust exports were a key factor in India’s post-Covid recovery—after dipping to $291.8 billion (Rs 24 lakh crore) in 2020-21,…

From a stalemate to reconciliation, Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot had to finally relent on his tough stance in order to end the two-week-long complete shutdown of private healthcare services in the state. What was being touted as a landmark legislation, the Rajasthan Right to Health (RTH) Bill ended up paralysing the state’s healthcare system after it was hurriedly pushed through the state assembly on March 21. Though initially refusing to roll it back, Gehlot on April 4 agreed to make changes to the rules and regulations, and till then put in abeyance the new law’s enforcement, following overnight hectic parleys to end the impasse with the representatives of striking private hospitals and doctors. Under the proposed law, every resident of the state was to have the right to get…

Barely hours after the Madras High Court endorsed his election on March 30, Edappadi K. Palaniswami (EPS) was officially elevated to the all-powerful post of the general secretary (GS) of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) party. Fawning supporters brought along a fur cap and dark glasses—the favourite fashion accessories of party founder M.G. Ramachandran (MGR)—for the former Tamil Nadu chief minister to try on, in an attempt to resurrect memories of the party’s early days. MGR and his protégé J. Jayalalithaa had held the post till their respective deaths. Jayalalithaa’s ambitious consort V.K. Sasikala took over the reins in December 2016, but her conviction on corruption charges just three months later led to EPS becoming the “accidental CM”. This after prostrating before Sasikala who had handpicked him…

Just over a year to go before the general election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seems to have borrowed a leaf out of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s book in anointing Samrat Choudhary, 54, its new state unit president. Samrat, who took over the office on March 27, comes from the Kushwaha caste, a group belonging to the Other Backward Classes (OBC) that is said to be the second largest after the Yadavs in Bihar’s caste pyramid. More significantly, the Kushwahas (or Koeris) are the ‘Kush’ in Bihar’s Luv-Kush bloc (Kurmis being the ‘Luv’) that is the bedrock of Nitish’s social support base. Since 2005, if Nitish’s Janata Dal (United) repeatedly succeeded against the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)’s strong vote bank of Muslims and Yadavs (or M-Y, who together account for…

A slow crisis has been engulfing rural West Bengal, affecting tens of thousands of labourers. Around 10 million people, despite having MNREGA job cards, have had no work over the past one year, nor have most been paid for the work done under the central jobs scheme. It resulted in massive joblessness and migration out of the state in 2022. NREGA Sangharsh Manch, a civil rights group, also claims that over 10 million may have been affected. The ostensible reason for the Centre withholding funds for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) is the allegation of widespread corruption in the administration and the ruling Trinamool Congress. The issue has been politicised for long—the TMC has blamed the Centre’s ‘vendetta politics’ for…