If the government of the day would like to set in place a smooth and well-planned changeover and facilitate the incoming chief to chalk out his action plan well in advance, the announcement of a successor needs to be done early, observes Colonel K Thammayya Udupa (retd).
I kept insisting that Rs 100 notes were in short supply and there was an urgent need to augment the supply of 100 rupee notes while also rapidly bringing into circulation the proposed new Rs 500 notes. But this was easier said than done because all the note printing machines of the RBI were programmed for printing Rs 2,000 notes and required at least three weeks before the machines could print the new Rs 500 currency notes. The availability of currency paper posed another major bottleneck, and it had to be imported. It was decided to immediately start printing the Rs 500 notes. It was only when the supply of the new Rs 500 notes started improving and the process of change of cassettes at the ATMs gathered momentum that the situation began limping back to normal. A fascinating excerpt from former SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar's The Custodian of Trust: A Banker's Memoir, five years after demonetisation, November 8.
In fact, given the current tensions and massed troops on both sides, there is a danger that the LAC will become more like the Line of Control with Pakistan, a heavily fortified and strongly defended border where weapon fire exchanges regularly occur. Indeed, Stratfor Worldview research has listed a sharp increase in new Chinese facilities along the LAC in 2019-20.
From triple talaq to simultaneous polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday touched upon the various issues n his monthly 'Mann ki Baat' radio address.
China's burgeoning automobile industry suffered a jolt as Honda, the second largest car manufacturer in the country, shut down all its four assembly plants after workers went on strike demanding better wages.
Former Indian diplomats on Monday termed the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan as a "setback" for India strategically, and asserted that the priority for New Delhi right now should be to evacuate its citizens from the war-torn nation.
Prohibitory orders were imposed in Delhi and parts of Karnataka. Police kept tight vigil in Kerala. In Gujarat, 50 people were arrested for Thursday's violence.
A top leader of fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party and Bangladeshi media doyen Mir Quasem Ali was sentenced to death on Sunday by a special tribunal for war crimes he committed during the independence war against Pakistan in 1971, days after the party's chief was given capital punishment on identical charges.
Suspected pro-Tamil protesters attacked and damaged a hotel run by a native of Karnataka in Chennai.
Kyle Jamieson said he believed he was capable of rapid improvement in both speed and general performance.
Overall, the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) has focused on building ground-based air defense networks and network-centric operations rather than trying to match the Indian Air Force (IAF) in terms of straight fighter numbers along the border. All air assets fall under the Western Theater Command of the PLA, the largest geographic region of China's five military theater commands.
The entire gamut of China's activities is aimed at keeping India on tenterhooks, cause fatigue to its troops and keeping its security system unstable, so that it cannot play a meaningful role in international geopolitics as an effective partner of the US and Japan, observes Lieutenant General Syed Ata Hasnain (retd).
India lost around 38.5 thousand hectares of tropical forest in the last decade. Nearly 14 per cent of the country's tree cover! It is one thing for Modi to announce that India will reach a net-zero level of emissions in 2070. But if it is serious, it needs to start today, points out Ramesh Menon.
Joginder Tuteja looks at the new release schedule for actress next year.
Delhi has come to accept the Taliban takeover in Kabul as a reality and seems increasingly unsure of its dogmatic view of the Taliban as a mere proxy of the Pakistani military and security establishment, observes Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
The time is ripe to extend the confrontation with the Chinese to the maritime domain, says former RA&W officer Krishan Varma.
A division bench of justices Biswanath Somadder and A Mukherjee said the government's silence on the permission is 'astonishing and astounding'.
With cyclone Phailin expected to make landfall in Odisha on Saturday, the state government mounted a massive operation to evacuate two lakh people from six coastal districts on Friday night
As the national capital reported 93 new cases taking the total number of infections to 669, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal held an emergency meeting with senior ministers and top officials of the Delhi government Wednesday evening and took a series of decisions to check the spread of the virus.
The second season of City Of Dreams has more pulp, hardly any juice, feels Sreehari Nair.
Savarkar believed Swarajya is more than the mere geographical independence of a stretch of earth called India. There was no point in fighting and sacrificing one's life for a Swarajya (mere territorial independence) at the cost of our Svatva (self-existence) or Hindutva itself! A revealing excerpt from Uday Mahurkar and Chirayu Pandit's Veer Savarkar: The Man Who Could Have Prevented Partition.
Veteran Olympian, Ashok Diwan has sought government help to return home after 'developing some health problems in the USA'.
General T N Raina was an iconic Indian military leader whose contributions to the nation should be more widely known, notes Lieutenant General Syed Ata Hasnain (retd).
North Korea considers Assad's Syria an ally, so it views Donald Trump's decision to strike Syria as a message to Pyongyang as well.
Prime Minister Modi told President Xi that he has made efforts to improve ties with Islamabad but these efforts have been "derailed".
India have won the Asia Cup on seven occasions, Sri Lanka on five occasions, with Pakistan winning it twice.
India cannot choose its geography and devise regional strategies to dovetail into the Western Indian Ocean hypothesis conceived in the Pentagon, argues Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Rather than worry about what picture of India is being painted in the foreign media, the focus must be on marshalling all our energies to provide relief and solace to our deeply wounded and dispirited citizens, says former foreign secretary Shyam Saran.
Fifty-nine-year-old Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist who lived in the US as a legal permanent resident and wrote for the Washington Post, was critical of the prince's policies and was killed in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in the Turkish city on October 2, 2018.
The weatherman said when 'Amphan' makes the landfall between West Bengal's Digha, some 180 km from Kolkata, and Hatiya island in Bangladesh on Wednesday afternoon or evening, it will pack sustained wind speed of 155 to 165 kmph, gusting at 185 kmph. The gale-force wind, blowing at a speed of 240 to 250 kmph and gusting to 275 kmph at one point, had lost intensity and was moving at a speed of 200 to 210 kmph, gusting to 230 kmph on Tuesday evening.
The Indian State has low operational capabilities. Individuals will have concerns about material that flows through the government, on questions of purity, perfection of the cold chain, and correctness of procedures at the frontline. Even if a government programme is able to solve all these problems, it will be limited in scale-up. The passion, management capabilities, and response to local conditions, which will be found with tens of thousands of ground-level initiatives, Individuals will have concerns about material that flows through the government, on questions of purity, perfection of the cold chain, and correctness of procedures. Even if a government programme is able to solve all these problems, it will be limited in scale-up, argues Ajay Shah.
'Our strategy should be to 'hold the line' in the north on the Sino-Indian land frontier, but maintain and, if possible, enlarge India's current edge in the maritime south.'
Ajit Balakrishnan on learning from past technology revolutions.
Bangladesh's violence-plagued general elections, being boycotted by opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led alliance, on Sunday witnessed low turn out in initial hours amid heavy security, as voters preferred to stay inside home fearing violence that has left six persons dead in last 12 hours.
'A deadly combination of money and religion lures them into the murky world of terrorism.' 'You will reach heaven if you kill -- what a doctrine!' Professor Ajoy Roy, whose son blogger Avijit Roy was brutally murdered in Dhaka last year, tells Rediff.com's Indrani Roy.
'Neither will China -- at least for now -- because its troops are deployed in equal strength.' 'We are negotiating at equal terms right now and it's a game of patience.'
Mere shuffling of resources or cosmetic changes to prove a point would be counterproductive in the long run, observes Commodore Venugoptal Menon (retd).
Addressing the Congress Working Committee, the president of the party said, ""Misfortunes do not come singly. India has been hit by a terrible economic crisis, a pandemic of huge proportions and, now, by a full-blown crisis on the borders with China. Much of each crisis is attributable to the mismanagement of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government and the wrong policies pursued by it."
Senior journalist Sandeep Unnithan, author of Black Tornado, a semi-official account of the 26/11 attacks, was on Rediff.com chat on November 26. In what was a frank and instructive interaction Rediff users spoke to the scribe about his views on the status of security and possible upgrades to the same.
'Whom do I want to marry and what decisions I make for marrying the person I love are totally personal decisions, in which neither the State nor the courts have any right to interfere.'
