There’s a type of courage you don’t always notice, but it takes real guts and a special kind of patience: the courage to challenge the system from inside. Think about the researcher who puts out findings nobody wants to hear, or the judge who gives an unpopular verdict. Then there’s the administrator who tells the…
The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, that was placed in Parliament in March 2026 has once again brought the debate on the regulation of foreign-funded organisations in India back into focus. While there is no doubt about the need to increase transparency and accountability of such organisations, the challenge before policymakers is one of…
Amitav Ghosh never set out to write a polemic with The Great Derangement. The book started life as the Berlin Family Lectures at the University of Chicago, and you can still feel that origin in its final form: it’s restless, essayistic, and willing to chase an argument wherever it leads. Ghosh roams across literary criticism,…
Budget Trends: Welfare vs Capital Expenditure Recent Union budgets have explicitly favored capital investment. The table below summarizes Union spending; the capital (capex) share of total expenditure has climbed from ~17% in FY2022-23 to ~23% in FY2026-27. Revenue expenditure (salaries, subsidies, subsidies etc.) has grown more slowly. States, facing rising debt-to-GSDP ratios (>40% in some)…
We ask AI for things dozens of times a day without ever once thinking about what it costs the planet to answer me. A recipe idea here, a draft email there, maybe a generated image for a birthday card, a quick summary of a paper we don’t have time to read. It’s so fast, so…
A MECHANICAL ENGINEER FROM HAZARIBAGH Balwant Lal Suman spent over fifteen years as a mechanical engineer before deciding he wanted to build something of his own. From Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, with no inherited capital and no existing network into government procurement, he founded Rigtech Infra, a manufacturing unit producing pipes for infrastructure applications. The dream was…
THE MOST UNIVERSAL COMPLAINT ABOUT INDIAN ROADS Ask any regular highway commuter in India what frustrates them most, and pothole-strewn stretches and waterlogged underpasses will almost certainly make the list. Manual maintenance simply cannot keep pace with monsoon damage at the scale of a 1.46-lakh-kilometre national highway network. Ahead of the 2026 monsoon season, NHAI…
THE PROMISE INSIDE THE PAPERWORK Bureaucratic transitions rarely make for compelling reading. Scheme names change, fund codes get reissued, ministries hold review meetings. Most of rural India never notices the difference. But on July 1, 2026, something genuinely consequential is scheduled to happen: India’s rural employment guarantee architecture, anchored for nearly two decades around MGNREGA,…
A MOUNTAIN THAT USED TO DECIDE WHO COULD TRAVEL For most of the year, the Zojila Pass has been less a road than a closed door. Snow, landslides, and a terrain so unforgiving that the average crossing time stretched to 3 hours on a good day and to nothing at all for nearly 5 months…
A NUMBER NOBODY TALKS ABOUT ENOUGH Here is a fact most Indians don’t carry in daily conversation: for most of the post-independence era, between 65 and 70 per cent of India’s military equipment was procured from abroad. Not built. Not designed. Bought often at a premium, often with strings attached, occasionally from countries whose interests…
