Varsha Singh
Passionate about social issues, especially children and women’s rights, rising inequity and human rights, Varsha Singh, a Post-Graduate in English (Hons) from Calcutta University and Mass Communications from St Xavier’s Calcutta, gravitated naturally to journalism in 2013. Varsha has made her passions the subject matter of her work and she has been writing regularly about these issues, besides business, tourism, culture and politics. Of late, Varsha has been pursuing another passion, multimedia journalism making videos reports on social issues and current affairs, looking at them with a different lens. Outside of her work, Varsha is equally passionate about cinema, music, travel and tea. Indeed, she is the inhouse film and music encyclopedia and a full-time chai-o-holic.
Poaching for power in Puducherry
February 22, 2021
Less than two months before Assembly elections are scheduled, the tiny union territory of Puducherry joins a long and ever-increasing list of state governments that have been toppled by the Bharatiya Janata Party ever since it won the Parliamentary elections in 2014. Ironically, ...
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Bhima Koregaon: Justice delayed & denied
February 19, 2021
Nothing, it seems, can make a difference to the judiciary in the infamous Bhima Koregaon case in which 16 eminent Indian scholars and activists have been locked up for two years on the flimsiest of legal grounds. Last week, a report in Washington Post revealed that an American di...
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Education: Budget 2021 fails the exam again
February 16, 2021
Right from the time that the ill-advised and horribly implemented lockdown to tackle Covid19 pandemic was imposed in late March 2020, students from lower middle class and poor families have been paying a heavy price as various reports indicate. A recent study done by British char...
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Indian diaspora seen through government lens: From patriots to pariahs
February 10, 2021
For the first six years of his rule as Prime Minister, Narendra Modi could not tire of singing praises of the Indian diaspora, especially as he flitted in and out of close to 100 nations, often marking the first-ever visit by an Indian Prime Minister to the country. His outreach ...
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Biden Yemen policy reset major setback to Saudi Arabia
February 8, 2021
While it was certain that the new President of the United States Joe Biden would modify and even reverse several of the most controversial decisions taken by his predecessor Donald Trump, the pace and the range of these radical alterations in US policy, notably the foreign policy...
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Tourism industry no destination for Budget 2021-22
February 6, 2021
When she presented her budget for the next fiscal year, 2021-22, India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman once again left the Indian tourism industry bitterly disappointed. For the past 10 months, the tourism industry has been crying out for emergency relief from the governm...
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How farmers’ protest in India became a global issue
February 4, 2021
It took just one question from American pop star Rihanna to apparently leave the Indian government shaken to its core. On February 2, global icon Rihanna posted a one-liner and asked her 101 million Twitter followers “Why aren’t we talking about this?! #FarmersProtest” whil...
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Budget 2021: Devil in details
February 3, 2021
For weeks, it had been touted as the most crucial budget that an Indian finance minister has had to place before the Parliament in several decades, if not since the independence of the country. After all, this was the first budget that the government has presented since the full-...
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Is India the Wild West of data privacy?
February 2, 2021
The parliamentary panel on Information Technology has been holding discussions on the Personal Data Protection Bill for almost a year now. Even as the bill stays in a draft stage, on the ground a lot has changed that would make a material difference to data privacy and protection...
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Budget 2021: Focus on demand boost, inequalities & jobs
January 31, 2021
Rare are the occasions when an Indian finance minister would pay heed to a report by a charity about what she needs to do in order to set the country’s malaise right. But on February 1, when union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman steps up to present the union budget for 2021...
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Tales of tractor rally on Republic Day through the lens
January 27, 2021
Violence was the norm of the day, it seems, during the Republic Day tractor rally organised by farmers protesting against the three farm laws passed last year. As the tractor rallies moved from various borders of Delhi, notably Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur, the farmers were welcome...
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After Republic Day melee, shocked farmers’ unions say focus on February 1 march to Parliament
January 27, 2021
The mood at Singhu border on Wednesday morning is sombre, to say the least. Weeks of preparations for the Republic Day Tractor Rally lay in shambles on Tuesday evening as violence at the iconic Red Fort and ITO in Delhi by a breakaway group of farmers overwhelmed the main tractor...
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