The Letter That Became a Parcel Ramesh Prasad has run a small handicraft business in Jaisalmer for eighteen years. He used to ship his stone carvings through private courier companies. These companies were expensive, unreliable at his remote pin code, and occasionally catastrophic for fragile goods. In 2023, he switched to India Post’s e-commerce parcel…
Picture the scene: a woman with a PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of Madras, sitting in a modest room in Kanchipuram back in 2002, her mind turning over the problem of child labour. At first glance, the leap is almost surreal. You’ve got atomic particles on one side, rural kids out of school…
The International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, has released the fact sheets of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2023–24, for the sixth round of India’s largest and most widely used health and demographic survey. The findings come nearly five years after NFHS-5 (2019–21), at a time when reducing child malnutrition remains a key…
India’s public health landscape is experiencing a notable demographic shift. The latest Sample Registration System (SRS) Statistical Report from the Registrar General of India shows that the country’s Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) has dropped to 24 deaths per 1,000 live births. The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has also fallen to 1.9, below the replacement level…
The Alert That Nobody Sent, But Everyone Received On the night of August 16, 2024, flash floods struck three villages in Himachal Pradesh’s Mandi district. Families were woken by the sound of water, not by a warning. Evacuation was reactive, not planned. Two people did not make it out. In the inquiry that followed, the…
The Award Given Twice: Once in Announcement, Once in Person The Padma Awards occupy a peculiar space in Indian public life. They are announced on Republic Day as part of the ceremonial calendar that marks India’s statehood. They are conferred months later in a formal investiture at Rashtrapati Bhavan, in a ceremony that converts a…
The Telecom Grave Nobody Expected to Open For most of the previous decade, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) was subject to a very specific kind of policy conversation. The public sector telecom company was losing money at a big scale, shedding subscribers in crores. BSNL was routinely described as irrelevant in a market dominated by…
The Village That Was Declared a Model Kanchanpur is a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Hamirpur district where approximately 65% of residents are from Scheduled Caste communities. In 2022, it was selected as an Adarsh Gram under PM-AJAY. Unfortunately, this was a designation that should have brought converged government services, infrastructure upgrades, and livelihood investment. By…
The Spice She Grew. The Market She Never Reached. Meenakshi Pillai grows turmeric on two acres in Erode, Tamil Nadu. The same district produces nearly 60% of India’s turmeric. She sells through a local aggregator at Rs. 80-90 per kilogram. The same turmeric, value-added into curcumin capsules and marketed under a wellness brand in Germany,…
After COVID-19 gripped the world in 2020, health systems, governments and international institutions everywhere vowed we’d ‘never be unprepared again’. Yet, the pandemic’s wake revealed crumbling health systems, lax surveillance, misinformation issues, healthcare inequities – and it seems that many of these lessons have not yet been fully grasped in a handful of African nations…
