Bengaluru goes underwater; Liz Truss takes guard; Arshdeep Singh Wiki slanders
Opinion Watch
Climate change is a reality, and Bengaluru is giving signs of future.
The Times of India in its Edit has sought to make a sense of the heaviest rainfalls on Sunday in India’s Silicon Valley, while videos of the people riding tractors to safety trended on social media platforms.
The daily reminded of chaotic city development, land sharks swallowing parks, lakes, storm water drains, and irrigation networks disappearing. Indeed, areas in Bengaluru where the city administration had recently repaired the storm water drains survived the rain fury.
ToI run through similar incidents such as flash floods in Hyderabad, Chennai floods, while people in Mumbai and Delhi know that heavy rains will bring waterlogging agonies. Even Srinagar sometimes ago had been flooded.
A young woman, Akhila S, was electrocuted in the whitefield area of Bengaluru. There is no short cut to ways out of the urban planning mess.
The expertise within the country with the municipal bodies such as Indore, New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), and Surat must be deployed for a short-term and long-term planning to clear the mess of decades with people’s participation in the decision making process.
Opinion polls on digital modes to execute works within a fixed deadline, besides a visible crackdown against the land sharks, as is being done in Uttar Pradesh, should be adopted by the Bengaluru municipal corporation.
Liz Truss takes guard
Liz Truss is the fourth Prime Minister of the UK in the past six years, while the country is battling serious economic crisis, fuelling demand for the welfare measures for the people.
The Pioneer has claimed that Truss in the high office would be good for India. The daily has called her a chameleon. She has indeed been shifting her stand, known first to have argued for the UK to stay in the European Union, only to revise her opinion later.
The Hindu has found virtue in this, noting “Truss has demonstrated in the past, it is her adaptable politics, especially at times when this trait could improve her prospects in the big picture”.
The daily has noted that she will face tough task ahead in implementing her “plan to introduce £30 billion in tax cuts including reversing the rise in National Insurance, temporarily dropping green levies on energy bills, and scrapping a planned rise in corporation tax, there are likely to be party members who will oppose her proposals”.
TP has recalled her previous strong remarks against China and Russia identifying “ideological vacuum and rushing to fill it, to hope that she would meet the deadline of signing the comprehensive economic partnership agreement with India by Diwali.
But it must be understood that India has to fight its own battle without expecting someone else to stand guard, and align policies and stances to the fast-changing global order.
Arshdeep Singh Wiki slanders
The Economic Times has strongly reacted to the slanders pushed through the Wikipedia against the young cricketer Arshdeep Singh, with evidences suggesting that for a full 15-minute Pakistanis had a field day in flooding misinformation on the publicly edited information platform.
This adds to the raging debate on dealing with the avalanche of misinformation. Since information warfare is part of the cognitive battles waged by the enemy countries, India will need to size up the challenges.
The ET underlined that normally Wikipedia reacts to such acts of vandals within minutes. But in the case of Arshdeep Singh, the Pakistani servers dished out misinformation with malicious intentions for several minutes.
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