Every winter, Delhi’s air turns into a slow emergency. Children are kept indoors. Hospitals fill up. AQI readings scroll past catastrophic on national television. This June, the Union Cabinet approved a ₹9,585 crore scheme to replace approximately 2.07 lakh ageing trucks and buses in the Delhi-NCR region with BS-VI or cleaner alternatives — a funded…
On the morning of World Environment Day 2026, Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri did something deceptively simple: he filled up a car. The vehicle was a Maruti Suzuki Wagon R Flex Fuel. This was India’s first mass-market flex-fuel car, launched just a day earlier. The fuel was E85, a blend of 80–85% ethanol and 14-19%…
In the context of India’s population over several decades, there is only one factor that has been a recurring topic of debate – growth. From overcrowding to public facilities, all issues related to India’s population revolved around one idea, namely, that India’s population will continue to grow at an unprecedented pace. All that is set…
Getting children into school has been the central obsession of education policy for as long as most of us can remember. And honestly, the world has pulled it off in ways that would have seemed impossible a few generations ago. Enrollment numbers have gone up, attendance is tracked, and governments have built schools in places…
THE QUESTION NOBODY WANTED TO SKIP Nations building AI capability generally face a political temptation: deploy first, govern later. The history of technology regulation suggests that temptation is almost always acted upon. India, in early 2026, chose a different path. The release of the India AI Governance Guidelines was anchored in 7 guiding principles and…
THE NUMBER THAT REWRITES THE STORY Somewhere in the crowded corridors of a government hospital in Lucknow, a nurse scans a QR code. In 4 seconds, she sees the patient’s blood test from 2 months ago, the prescription from a private clinic in Kanpur, and the discharge summary from a district hospital. Nothing was lost…
A DECADE IN NUMBERS There is a version of India’s startup story that begins with a number: 502. That is how many startups the government had formally recognised when Startup India was launched in January 2016. By March 2026, that number stood at 2,23,000. The numbers saw a 444-fold increase in a single decade. Those…
A SCENE REPEATED 75 LAKH TIMES Picture a vegetable vendor in Lucknow. Before June 2020, if her cart was washed out in the monsoon, there was no bank that would lend her the few thousand rupees she needed to restock. The moneylender would, at 60% interest. The PM Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) scheme,…
INTRODUCTION On 1st June 2026, consignments of Indian gems, agricultural produce, and pharmaceutical goods were flagged off into the Gulf. This was observed as a quiet, historical event at the ports of Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai. Fortunately, this time, not a single rupee of import duty waiting on the other side. The India-Oman Comprehensive Economic…
In the rain-fed rice cultivation areas of Odisha and Maharashtra, drought years are not gender-blind events. In fact, research based on national sample survey data in India, conducted by the Asia-Pacific branch of UNDP, has shown that when rainfall is poor, women farm workers earn less in terms of wages than men, specifically in rice-growing…
