IT is disturbing the way the Indian government and the regulatory authorities have handled the emergency use for vaccines for Covid-19. It started with the emergency use being granted to Oxford-AstraZeneca-Serum Institute's (Oxford-SII) Covidshield vaccine, and the furore in the BJP's social media-troll army for not granting similar approval for the indigenous National Institute of Virology-ICMR-Bharat Biotech's (NIV-BB) Covaxin, framing it as an angrezi versus Indian vaccine issue.

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.

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. In India, three vaccine manufacturers, Pfizer-BioNTech, Serum Institute for the Oxford-AstraZeneca, and Bharat Biotech have also applied for emergency use.

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. The situation was exacerbated, as usual, by seasonal pollution-generating activities and seasonal as well as other weather conditions.

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.