Articles by A Correspondent

With less than six months to go before the Hong Kong ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation, there is no sign of movement forward on the contentious issues of trade in agriculture and market access in industrial goods. Yet, the contours of a deal can also be seen. Hong Kong will be a test for the new WTO chief, Pascal Lamy, who as the European Commission trade commissioner pushed for the launch of the Doha round in 2001.

Recent guidelines on the eligibility criteria for PhD registration and the process of submission of doctoral theses in the universities in Maharashtra do not address the malaise affecting research. The guidelines, drawn up by the academic bureaucracy and without consulting the teaching community, will in fact create new problems and discourage potential research scholars.

Even many of the fiercely strident pressure groups which smell a rat in everything connected with the World Trade Organisation realise that what happened at Cancun was not a great victory for the developing countries.

Even more worrying than the UGC's recent move to redesignate Women Studies Centres to include family studies are the simultaneous changes being prescribed in the scope of their activities and the structure and functioning of these centres.

West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had reason to complain that his state did not get the praise it deserved from the prime minister during the latter's recent visit to Kolkata for the shining example it had set in maintaining communal harmony, in contrast to the shameful happenings in Gujarat. But there was no need for him to take umbrage at the prime minister's advice to the state to do more on the economic front to regain the leading position it had once held in the country.