THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED Indore, June 13, 2026. Eleven nations. One room. One unanimous vote. The 16th BRICS Agriculture Ministers’ Meeting produced the Indore Declaration. It was a farmer-centric compact, adopted without dissent, binding nearly half the world’s agricultural land under a shared commitment to food security, climate resilience, and seed sovereignty. Under India’s…
Rahul has a degree. He has sent 200 applications. He is twenty-three years old, and he is still at home in Indore, waiting for the market to catch up to what he was told he was worth. According to PLFS (2023-2024), India’s overall unemployment rate is 3.2%, which, by global standards, sounds like progress. But…
Statistical revision rarely makes headlines. But this one should. On June 2, 2026, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) released a new Index of Industrial Production (IIP) series with 2022–23 as the base year, replacing the 2011-12 series that had become increasingly obsolete. Along with it came April 2026 data: industrial output grew…
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…
At a busy traffic signal, surrounded by speeding scooters, autos, and impatient commuters, a man in a wheelchair moves steadily ahead. He wears a Zomato jacket, carrying not just deliveries but a lesson for an entire city. Every day, we scroll through our phones and order food with a few taps. Within minutes, a delivery…
Every food delivery, every cab ride, every quick commerce order placed in India is fulfilled by a worker who has no minimum wage guarantee, no health insurance, and no pension. That is not an oversight. It is how India’s platform economy was designed to function. That is now changing. The government has set June 22,…
One Agreement, Multiple Frontiers It is unusual for a trade deal to carry the weight of energy security, diaspora diplomacy, and strategic geography all at once. The India–Oman Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which entered into force on June 1, 2026, does all three. It was signed in Muscat on December 18, 2025, in the…
The Numbers Behind the Movement Walk down any Indian city street today and you will encounter a chai vendor, a fruit cart or a cobbler. The harshest part is they are invisible in our policies, but very essential in life. For decades, this workforce worked outside formal finance, trapped in debt cycles with local moneylenders…
