During his visit, Mukherjee visited the hotbed of Madhesi protests Janakpur and met ex-servicemen of Gurkha regiments in Pokhra.
Policy lays out a 5-year road map seeking creation of 3.5 mn jobs and promoting 10,000 start-ups.
'Modi and Abe are working seriously for India-Japan bonhomie to grow stronger.' 'It is a win-win situation for both countries and the future look promising,' says Rajaram Panda, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations India Chair Visiting Professor at Reitaku University, Japan.
'If the RSS should be saluted for choosing such a scholarly statesman to address its highly trained cadre, one must also praise Pranab Da's sagacity for having gracefully accepting the invitation, thus disapproving any ideological apartheid,' says former BJP MP Tarun Vijay.
'So we had Akshay Kumar dressed up like Robert Vadra on his offday, and trying to not look fan-struck...'
Devastation struck Venezuela when oil prices started collapsing in 1982, following a global oil glut. The country's economy contracted overnight.
Promising to espouse the cause of Tamils living the world over, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam on Tuesday promised to press the Centre to take steps for conducting a referendum among Tamils in Lanka for their homeland and to appoint only Tamil envoys to nations which have a sizeable Diaspora.
Seeking the support of corporates for making Delhi a clean and modern city in the next five years, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday invited them to invest in New Delhi even as he promised that their money will not be wasted.
'We need to be in a perpetual state of aggression, and able to swiftly change the goal posts to keep Pakistan in a state of imbalance,' argues Sanjeev Nayyar.
Punjab politics has produced a dog's breakfast on the river waters issue. Except, you'd see even dogs eat better, says Shekhar Gupta.
Muzzling NGOs is unbecoming of a democracy. Self-confident democracies encourage, indeed applaud, the involvement of citizens' associations, including NGOs, in social and political decision-making and development planning. Instead, our paranoid government bullies and terrorises them, says Praful Bidwai.
'India has always been a land of acceptance of diversity. But if the evangelical activities continue unabated, there is no doubt this will cause a backlash.' 'One exclusive ideology begets another. The hit list will spread. The more strident the evangelists, the more strident the voices for Ghar Wapsi will grow.'
India loses 333 acres of prime forest every day. Instead of working to conserve India's forests and water resources, the environment minister has set up a committee to 'dismantle' the five key laws that provide environmental protection.
'Power sits lightly on Arun Jaitley's shoulders. Just because earth-shaking election results have brought his party in power, he has not gone recklessly ambitious. "Too soon, too fast" is not what he likes,' says Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com about Budget 2014.
'Animal populations are increasing. Human populations are increasing. So there is no way the man-animal conflict going to go away.'
Anti-conversion laws are needed since thrusting the idea of a competitive battlefield of religion onto India's pluralistic traditions can only lead to greater communal conflict, says Sankrant Sanu
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Arunachal Pradesh on Friday, February 20, irritated the Chinese government so much that it summoned the Indian ambassador to register its protest against Modi visiting a territory China claims as Southern Tibet.
'One big problem for the RSS is, while they spread their ideology of hard, Hindu-ised Indian nationalism, the absence of their own pantheon of modern nationalist giants. They missed out on the freedom movement quite comprehensively, in some ways comparable to the Muslim League and latter-day Communists. They have to find heroes elsewhere.' 'They borrow who they can from the Congress, like Madan Mohan Malviya and Sardar Patel, and then steal the entire lot of revolutionaries, from Bhagat Singh to Netaji, never mind that many of them were extreme leftists.'
Israel is determined to take the bilateral engagement to a different level that goes beyond defence hardware and intelligence software. Kanchan Gupta reports exclusively from Tel Aviv for Rediff.com
The Bombay Hemp Company offers goods fashioned out of hemp, the lesser known cousin of ganja.
Most top industrialists rate PM's first 100 days in office as 'good', primarily due to his intentions, not concrete policy measures.
Prime Minster Narendra Modi's op-ed in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeines talks about development, New Age India and his 'Make in India' campaign. Here's the complete text of the column.
President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday addressed the first joint sitting of Parliament as mandatorily required under the Constitution after the general elections. The address is the political, economic and foreign policy road map of the Narendra Modi government and covers virtually all crucial areas.
20 years ago this day, May 11, 1998, India conducted its second nuclear test at Pokharan in Rajasthan. In a fascinating interview on Rediff.com, K Subrahmanyam revealed how Indian PMs reacted to nuclear ambitions.
'In the final analysis, all Budgets everywhere are like the schemes hatched by A A Milne's lovable Winnie-the-Pooh.' 'They may be well-intended, but often go awry.' 'Although Pooh and his friends agree that he 'has very little brain', he is occasionally acknowledged to have a clever idea, usually driven by common sense.' 'This Budget at a first glance does not appear to belong to that latter category,' says economist Shreekant Sambrani.
'The intrusion in Chumar, during and beyond the Chinese president's visit, is unprecedented and has qualitatively changed the tone of the India-China relationship,' says Jayadeva Ranade, a member of the National Security Advisory Board.
The winners of the 60th annual World Press Photo Contest have been announced. The winning shot was taken by Turkish Associated Press photographer called Burhan Ozbilici, with an image he has simply titled An Assassination in Turkey. Showing Mevlut Mert Altintas shouting after shooting Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, at an art gallery in Ankara, Turkey, on December 19 2016.
India's top metro cities need to improve their infrastructure and other civic amenities too.
Following is the full text of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech at the Central Party School in Beijing on Thursday:
On the occasion of the first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's 125th birth anniversary, Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com visits his residence of 16 years, and comes away marvelling at his enduring legacy.
Let us hope that what happened in 1962 will never happened again, prays Claude Arpi