Skip to main content

Posts

How to Shop Ethically in 2022?

The amount that we buy increases every year. According to the National Retail Federation , American shoppers buy more and more every year, with an average increase of 4.4% annually, and a record increase of 8.2% in 2020. As we begin another year, consider adding ‘ethical shopping’ to your list of resolutions for 2022. Easier said than done, you may be saying! With so many guides to the “best ethical brands” in every industry, it can be difficult to know where to start. This guide will help you understand what ethical shopping is and how you can apply ethical shopping in your day to day life for all types of products. Read more about Green Tax  here. What is Ethical Shopping? At its core, ethical shopping is the practice of buying from companies whose values you support.  This definition, of course, leaves a lot of room for interpretation. For example, the values of an organization may be expressed in different ways, such as how they produce their products, how they treat thei

Green Tax for a Greener Society

  Recently, Tesla has launched their electric cars in the Indian market. Though there has been a mixed reaction by the Indian consumers because of the price of the cars and lack of charging facilities. It is expected that Tesla will find it difficult to compete with the Diesel and Petrol variants as well as Indian electric car manufacturers. Talking about electric cars in order to curb environmental pollution and encourage people to switch to eco-friendly transportation mode, the Union Ministry for Road Transport and Highways of India has approved a proposal to levy a ‘Green Tax’ on old vehicles. Experts argues that, charging taxes on vehicles that cause environmental pollution will decrease environmental loss in a cost effective manner by encouraging behavioural changes among people. The Green Tax can be seen as a measure to strengthen India’s commitment to the Paris Agreement of 2015. As per the agreement India has targeted to reducing the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33-35%

Urban Sprawl: An Emerging Issue

  Humans are becoming an increasingly urban species. They want to move to metropolitan cities and urban centres for better jobs opportunities or for the excitement of the city life. And this possess a really challenging developmental question of where are all these people going to go and if you live in a city, you might have noticed the expansion and the development of cities to suburbs and this is what we call urban sprawl. In 1937, Earle Draper - one of the first city planners in the south-eastern United States coined the term ‘sprawl.’ The urban sprawl is essentially the geographical expansion of a city or town and is often characterised as low density development, meaning housing is being built on really large land areas or scattered land locks, single use zoning and is also characterised by the increased reliance on private automobiles for each person transportation. The sprawl generally takes place in radial course around the city centre or in linear direction along the highways.

QUAD or No QUAD? That is the Question

QUAD is an informal strategic dialogue between four democracies namely India, the United States, Japan and Australia. The objective of this group is to secure the Indo-pacific region from Chinese expansion policy.   Origin of QUAD: 2004-2007 In order to understand the importance of the QUAD let’s see its origin first. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the first major disaster of the 21 st century in which thousands of people died, lakhs of people were displaced from their hometown, billions of dollar worth property damaged. That time the disaster relief and rescue operation in the Indian Ocean was led by the Indian navy. Within a few weeks the humanitarian and disaster relief effort was coordinated with three other major powers namely the United States, japan and Australia. In continuation to that in 2007 the former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe talked about the idea of confluence of two seas and the need for larger strategic coordination between the democratic parties In

RCEP: Why India is not the part of World’s Biggest Trade Agreement?

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership or RCEP is a trade agreement involving 10 ASEAN nations namely (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) and five nations with which they have a free Trade Agreement, those are (Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea). RCEP came into existence at the 37th ASEAN Summit hosted virtually by Vietnam. It is the world’s biggest trade deal comprising 15 countries, 2.2 bn people, combined Gross Domestic Product of $26.2 tn Till recently, India was also a part of the trade deal, which it decided not to continue with. We will see the reasons why India took such an important decision of not joining the RCEP. First let’s see what the conditions to join the RCEP trade deal are:   RCEP Requires members to: Decrease tariffs and non-tariff barriers against each other. Encourage investments, economic and technical cooperation like Foreign Direct Investments,

COVID-19 and Changing International Political Order

At the time of pandemic the world order is changing in a very structural sense. Today our world is in the state of chaos. This has been a matter of concern because earlier the world was not that much interconnected. But today when the information technology has revolutionised the way we see our world, the nations are so much interconnected, so that the chaos can have a multiplier effect. The famous Henry Kissinger in his book “World Order” had said that “there has never been a truly world order.” According to him the four vision of world order are:       I.         Westphalian State Centric World Order: It is based on the ideas of non-interference in domestic affairs. The principle of Nation Sovereignty will remains very sacred. India’s very famous the Panchsheel principle is based on this vision.     II.         Islamic world order of Darul Islam:   In this contemporary world we have been witnessing the rise of Islamic threat. Various terrorist organisations such as ISIS, Al