Here is an explainer on the functioning of the seven-year-old body.
If Modi wants to leave a real legacy, breaking India's strategic triangulation would be the real gift, notes Shekhar Gupta.
Where do Vijay and his TVK expect to get their votes from? Vijay has a huge fan following among women, but will they automatically become his voters like they had done for MGR's AIADMK, asks N Sathiya Moorthy.
Pradhan, who is also the skill development minister, said he has received positive feedback from students on the plan to conduct board exams twice a year.
Is it is necessary to play divisive politics to succeed in the next general elections? asks Dr Sudhir Bisht.
'What should surprise BJP supporters is Modi's call for 'stability' at the manifesto launch, a theme that he and his team members had not touched ahead of the Lok Sabha polls in 2014 and 2019.' 'The last time the party called for 'stability at the Centre' was in 1998 and 1999,' recalls N Sathiya Moorthy.
Brand India's societal divisions and distortions have remained as much relevant in 'liberal' America and Europe as it still is in the structurally stratified Indian society of the 21st century, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
As some BJP pollsters concede, the Modi leadership's sweeping success in elections 2019, especially across central India, owed not to Hindutva ideology, but to welfare schemes, all of them borrowed from Tamil Nadu, reveals N Sathiya Moorthy.
Higher education policy may be at the core of the Tamil Nadu assembly polls next May, with a potential to break the ties between the ruling AIADMK in the state and the BJP counterpart at the national level, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Stalin, like his father M Karunanidhi did in 2004, may play the king-maker in a way -- not the king, unless the 2024 post-poll circumstances throws up a situation where he alone becomes acceptable to the rest, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
The reforms proposed for the monster examinations, JEE and NEET, which take several students' lives every year don't go far enough.
'A recent compromise by the state government is accepting NEET exams for medical entrance.'
"The provisions of the said bill are nothing short of draconian and promote gross incompetence and mockery of professionals currently working day and night and sacrificing their youth for this broken system," said the protesting doctors.
A time has thus come when state encouragement for rural students led to empowerment of the socio-economically marginalised sections of the population. It included women. Today, with greater exposure and consequent enlightenment, it has gone beyond 'empowerment' to become 'entitlement', says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Rediff.com does a quick checklist on what the two manifestos have to say on hot-button issues of the day.
At first look, the reader would be aghast at the similarities in the DMK and AIADMK's manifestos, wondering if the same hand had drafted both. Yet, when it comes to drinking water and irrigation supplies, both parties are equally silent on the subject -- as if summer did not exist, as didn't water scarcity, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Here's the full text of President Ram Nath Kovind's customary address to the joining sitting of Parliament on the first day of the budget session.
