I don’t understand his penchant for late-night announcements, much less one at 10 pm on Christmas night, but Prime Minister Narendra has just said the government will roll out vaccines for young adults aged 15-18 years from January 3, 2022 – around the same time I received a press release from Bharat Biotech saying the…… Continue reading About vaccines for children and Covaxin…
Tag: Prime Minister Narendra Modi
On The Caravan’s new profile of The Hindu
On December 1, The Caravan published a 50-page report entitled ‘Paper Priests: The battle for the soul of The Hindu’. The report – actually, as a friend put it, a big profile – has many good parts and many others, not so much, especially from the point of view of an insider: I worked there…… Continue reading On The Caravan’s new profile of The Hindu
Dirty power
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the COP26 summit in Glasgow that India will install 500 GW of non-fossil-fuel energy generation capacity by 2030. In his analysis of Modi’s speech for The Wire Science, Kabir Agarwal wrote that the phrasing evokes a contrast with Modi’s announcement at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit on New…… Continue reading Dirty power
It’s great that the WHO isn’t just ‘not cutting corners’
Call me anti-national (and I’m sure many will) but I’m glad that the WHO isn’t just “not cutting corners” in the process of considering Bharat Biotech’s application for the UN body’s stamp of approval Covaxin but is also openly calling for more and more information from the company at periodic intervals. This isn’t just a…… Continue reading It’s great that the WHO isn’t just ‘not cutting corners’
The ‘one billion doses’ hype
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has addressed India’s people 10 times during the country’s COVID-19 epidemic. This is fairly regular but also not frequent – that is, Modi’s addresses are something of special occasions, especially since it’s one of the few ways he interacts with the people at large (he doesn’t like speaking to the independent…… Continue reading The ‘one billion doses’ hype
He is never wrong
Akshay Deshmane reported for The Morning Context on October 20 that the Union environment ministry has reversed two important decisions it made earlier this year: (a) to invite private law firms to help amend the Indian Forest Act 1927 and (b) to oppose the Delhi high court’s directive to translate the new draft EIA notification…… Continue reading He is never wrong
Political merch from a newsroom
Shekhar Gupta, the editor of The Print, shared the following image on his Instagram profile a couple days ago: The post had the following note: Since we so love politics at ThePrint, we are developing a range of gifting merchandise. This mug is one such example. In the course of the next few days I…… Continue reading Political merch from a newsroom
ISRO’s national interest bullshit
For data and other objects, like images and videos, it places in the public domain, the Indian government attaches the GODL license – short for ‘government open data license’. The terms of this license are fairly straightforward: that … all users are provided a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, adapt, publish (either in original,…… Continue reading ISRO’s national interest bullshit
Revisiting ‘The Resistance of the Time’
Let us visit the future – a suitable point of time located in one of the many tomorrows ahead of us, a tomorrow far enough to have left The Time behind. What do we see? We see, among other things, that many people spoke up. Many people did not. Many people who spoke up did…… Continue reading Revisiting ‘The Resistance of the Time’
The problems with one-shot Covishield
NDTV quoted unnamed sources in the Indian government saying it will be conducting a study to assess the feasibility of deploying the Covishield vaccine in a single-dose regimen instead of continuing the extant double-dose regimen. At any other time, such a statement may have been sufficient to believe the government would organise and conduct a…… Continue reading The problems with one-shot Covishield
root privileges 