The foolishness of a carbon-negative blockchain
With the experience of ‘fortress conservation’, poor implementation of the Forest Rights Act and the CAMPA philosophy in India, it’s hard not to think that the idea of carbon offsets is stupid. This m…
Analysis
257 posts
On The Caravan's new profile of The Hindu
On December 1, The Caravan published a 50-page report entitled ‘Paper Priests: The battle for the soul of The Hindu’. The report – actually, as a friend put it, a big profile – has many good parts and…
The vaccine that was built from scratch
I have no plans to read ICMR chief Balram Bhargava’s new book, Going Viral, about the “inside story” of Covaxin’s making, and am grateful for that reason for Dr Jammi Nagaraj Rao’s quick but seemingly…
Panicking about omicron
The new omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has got everyone alarmed – which is darkly ironic. This variant has reportedly racked up more mutations than previous variants of concern, including th…
The toxic affair between Covaxin and The Lancet
That Covaxin has been leading a ceaselessly beleaguered life is no mystery – but The Lancet journal may not know that it has been pressed into the questionable service of saving the vaccine's repu…
Dirty power
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the COP26 summit in Glasgow that India will install 500 GW of non-fossil-fuel energy generation capacity by 2030. In his analysis of Modi’s speech for The Wir…
Is Covaxin's WHO approval guaranteed?
I suspect after reading this PTI report that the WHO is practically helping Bharat Biotech put together a better application to have its COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, get the body's approval for inte…
It's great that the WHO isn't just 'not cutting corners'
Call me anti-national (and I'm sure many will) but I'm glad that the WHO isn't just "not cutting corners" in the process of considering Bharat Biotech's application for the U…
Dream11: How hard should we work to play cricket for India?
The TV ads for the fantasy cricket app Dream11 seem objectionable, to my mind. Thus far, I've seen three high-profile players of the Indian men's cricket team in these ads: Rohit Sharma, Shikh…
A new way to harass editors?
There’s a new way to harass editors – or perhaps it’s an old way that we’re just finding out about, first-hand. We know that repressive governments have started using the US’s infamous Digital Millenn…
Will this blog be online a hundred years from today?
For almost two weeks now, we at The Wire have been dealing with a complaint that someone from Maharashtra lodged against us with Amazon Web Services (AWS), our sites’ host, for allegedly copying one p…
The great Nobel Prize hypocrisy
Katie Langin's report for Science on October 12 is an eye-opening account of one reason why the committees that pick every year's Nobel Prize winners almost never pick women: because they aren…