IN this bitter winter cold, lakhs of farmers have been protesting at the Delhi border against the three Farm Acts. Along with the Farm Acts, farmers are also demanding the rollback of the Electricity (Amendment) Bill 2020. This Bill if passed, is likely to add Rs100,000 crore of additional burden on the farmers and increase their costs of irrigation by 500 per cent.The proposed amendment seeks to remove all cross-subsidies and make all consumers pay the actual cost of supply, or what the amendment calls, the cost to serve the consumer.

SIX vaccines for Covid-19 have either released, or likely to release within a few weeks of their figures of vaccine efficacy, or how effective their vaccines are. Those who get the initial green signal from the regulators to roll out the vaccine will get a huge market advantage. That is why there is intense media focus on the US and the UK approval processes of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

HERE we are once again in the midst of the seemingly inevitable problem of air pollution in Delhi and the neighbouring National Capital Region. The Air Quality Index (AQI) over the past fortnight shot up to “very poor” and even reached the “severe” category for a few days around Diwali.

INDIA finally signed the BECA (Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement on Geo-spatial Cooperation) accord with the US during the 2+2 Meeting between the foreign and defence ministers of the two countries in New Delhi on October 27, 2020.  BECA is the fourth of the so-called foundational defence agreements between India and the US. The US has variations of these four agreements with its NATO and other allies or close international partners, as well as with many countries to which it sells military hardware.

THE US Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Google-Alphabet (Alphabet is Google's parent company) for using a range of anti-competitive practices using its monopoly power in the search market. It is the only major action in the US against tech monopolies in recent years, the last one being the 1998 action against Microsoft.Google currently has a market share in online searches globally of more than 90 per cent that rises to more than 98 per cent in countries like India.