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The unanimous passage of the LBA bill through both houses of Parliament underlines the growing maturity of the political discourse on foreign policy in India. In particular, the larger political parties have shown that building consensus on India's foreign policy can increasingly be a bipartisan affair.

The problem with the Indian state is less to do with capacity, than the state-society interaction being constrained by political dynamics. The state measures continue to be captive to narrow, patronage-driven political imperatives that are highly embedded in political returns at national and state levels.

The twin bomb blasts during the Boston Marathon on April 16 present new counter-terrorism challenges for the US as well as other countries gearing up to face a rapidly mutating threat.

Given the US's counter-terrorism experience and security threat, it is in its interest to come out of its earlier bureaucratic deadlock and view the threat of terrorism more objectively and work to enhance counter-terrorism cooperation with countries such as India.

With the US already having made a strong base to deal with terrorist activities from external sources, it is time the US, and other countries develop mechanisms that tackle home-grown groups with vigour, but without endangering the principles of 'rule of law'. This is particularly important as the elements of home-grown terrorism are, in fact, the citizens of the respective countries.

In healthcare, one of the main rudimentary elements is health education which is lacking in India. Hygiene and cleanliness are very important as is emphasised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and if basic habits like washing hands before eating are inculcated in the people, a lot of diseases could be prevented.

Brazil's Ambassador to India, Mr Carlos Duarte, thinks that trade between Brazil and India should grow not just in absolute terms but also in qualitative terms.

Enabling greater free trade and removing NTBs should be undertaken with the goal of not just regional integration and growth but also development of communities, employment and poverty alleviation across South Asia.

As India's online footprint has increased, so has the role of e-commerce. The industry is expected to cross $6 billion in revenues by 2015, not including ticketing and travel, according to Gartner Research. It must then follow that e-commerce should be encouraged to play a key role in building requisite supply chain efficiencies across India.

Notwithstanding the fact that Arvind Kejriwal had to resign as Delhi Chief Minister because he could not get through the Jan Lokpal Bill in the Assembly and BJP and Congress accusation that Kejriwal quit after creating an excuse for doing so, Kejriwal and AAP have not lost their popularity among the people of Delhi.

Smart Grid technology solutions can not only help India reduce its transmission and distribution losses, but can also help leap to the future by bundling major public utilities over one single grid.

BRIC or BRICs is an acronym referring to the fast growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The acronym is used increasingly by politicians and the mass media, reflecting the emergence of a new global reality.

It is apparent that panaceas such as debt write-downs only offer short term relief to the debt ridden Eurozone as long as structural imbalances persist. European leaders need to look for a multipronged approach to deal with the problems.

At this unique geopolitical moment, when India faces a multitude of challenges seeking its attention both towards the region and the global stage, BRICS provides a flexible platform to respond to both.

The BRICS bank, now tentatively called the New Development Bank, is indeed a new and long overdue development. It is the first step towards reforming the world financial system. It has to be read against the decision of the BRICS nations to do trade more with each other on the basis of currency swaps.

The major achievement of the recent BRICS Summit was the decision to create the long-awaited (BRICS) New Development Bank. The bank can be seen as a growing influence of the BRICS which together represents 18% of the World trade and accounts for 40% of the global population with a combined GDP of $ 24 trillion.

The BRICS-Africa partnership provides the potential for positive cooperation between developing nations in the future. It is this potential that delegates from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will be trying to cultivate and deepen over the next couple of days in Durban.

The BRICS leaders have accepted the report titled "Towards a Long Term Strategy for BRICS", the recommendations made by the BRICS Think Tanks Council (BTTC). Observer Research Foundation is the Indian representative at the BTTC.

Has the emergence of BRICS had an impact on IBSA, was the question posed by Mr M Ganapathi, former Secretary (West) in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Government of India.

BRICS must now move on from being a grouping of individual nations, discussing agendas, to becoming a "go-to" institution for setting regional and global agendas. The essence and ethos of such an institution must flow from the inorganic prism of stability, security and growth for all.

Perhaps, the most critical issue for the five BRICS leaders, who will meet at the sunny shores of Fortaleza, will be practical goal-setting. This will be an exercise in planning and coordination to maintain continuity as well as honing in on objectives for the long term. If there is an opportunity to be seized in cross-leveraging political and economic ties, it will be in the coming years.

The Fortaleza summit will represent the reboot of BRICS. Prime Minister Modi has the biggest political mandate among his BRICS counterparts, and also the weight of the largest expectations.

The recent G-20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, featured a pivotal change in the geopolitics of international finance. Emerging economies contributed billions to an emergency IMF (International Monetary Fund) fund designed to provide additional support to the Eurozone nations in case the debt crisis worsens.

Think tanks from five BRICS countries, participating in the 5th Academic Forum meeting in Durban, have announced the setting up of the BRICS Think Tanks Council (BTTC).

The unity and purpose of BRICS has been the target of speculation and scepticism from various quarters. With the Delhi Declaration, BRICS members have been able to assuage such doubts as they have begun to create a credible hedge against traditional global narratives of security and development.

China as the leader of the pack will use BRICS for control and dominance. The West will see this as a threat to existing arrangements and try to pull it down before it takes off. Indian presence will remain weak so long as our economic reforms and progress remain slow and our internal political and policy frameworks remain uncertain.

BRICS is an evolving process, and any exaggerated notion of it becoming a power bloc will be out of place. It might work towards "a multi-polar (or poly-centric) world", which a former Brazilian President had described as an important goal of BRICS, but in no sense it is a ganging-up against the US or the West.

India and Bangladesh relations got a new boost following Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's brief visit to Bangladesh recently, demonstrating New Delhi's keenness in enhancing bilateral relations.

Any suggestion of a look west policy compels a comparison with India's much-celebrated Look East policy and presents us with a paradox. India's relationship with the Gulf is much denser than with Southeast Asia. Yet the Gulf does not resonate as much as Southeast Asia in Indian Foreign Policy discourse.

Whatever shape future talks between India and China takes, bilateral problems, including the border dispute, have taken more time than their people can wait, to address leave alone resolve them.

The 2nd session of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC) was held in Beijing from Mar 5-13, 2009, the first session after the onset of the global economic crisis

Climate change defined officially as 'a change in the state of the climate that can be identified among other things by changes in the mean and / or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer' is among major challenges facing countries.

The NBSA process needs to keep pace with the fists of fury that politicians are unleashing on each other. Particularly so as the level of unsubtantiated allegations is getting worse as we're getting closer to the General Elections 2014.

Mayawati has apparently decided that she should retain her core constituency hoping that everything else would fall in place

Spillovers from unconventional monetary policy in the AEs pose a systemic risk for emerging market economies (EMEs). Unconventional monetary policies to ensure cheap liquidity and easy credit conditions have been used not only in the US but in Europe as well as Japan.

Budget 2004, despite the change of regime in New Delhi, maintains the much required continuity for critical power sector reforms to achieve the country¿'s "Power for All" objective by 2012 and double installed capacity to over 200,000 MW .The salient features in the budget vis-a-vis the power sector are:

The macro-economic situation at this point of time is indisputably negative and the Budget for 2013-14 should set realistic spending allocations with the aim to reduce the fiscal deficit to sustainable levels.

The focus on delivery of various schemes is missing in this budget. Each year, public money is being poured into them, but things remain the same unless there are dynamic state ministers monitoring everything. Some provision for effective monitoring should have made in budget 2013-14.