More than half a century since India started the first blindness prevention programme in the world, the nation still carries one of the greatest burdens of avoidable blindness anywhere in the world. While clinicians fight their usual foe of blindness caused by cataract in rural clinics, a new enemy has appeared on the horizon, in…
India has one of the largest mandated corporate social responsibility frameworks in the world. Since 2014, companies above a certain size have been legally required to spend at least 2% of their average net profits on social causes from education and healthcare to environmental sustainability and skill development. In FY 2022-23 alone, eligible companies collectively…
India’s largest school education scheme is facing a quiet funding crisis. Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan, the Union government’s flagship programme covering school education from pre-primary to Class 12, is receiving higher headline allocations on paper. But the real story lies beneath the numbers. Even as Budget 2026-27 increased allocations for Samagra Shiksha, budget cuts have resulted…
The Summit That Was Also a Market Arjun Mehta arrived at WAVES 2025 in Mumbai with a portfolio of three animated short films made with his eight-person studio in Hyderabad. He had never pitched to an international buyer before. On the second day of the summit, he met a content acquisition executive from a Southeast…
The Number That Measures Everything Else In the summer of 2023, a mid-sized electronics manufacturer in Noida expanded its production line for printed circuit boards, adding capacity for a new category of consumer device that had not existed in any significant volume five years earlier. When this expansion showed up in India’s monthly data, it…
The Country That Did Not Make the Headlines When Prime Minister Modi’s European diplomatic week in May 2026 was discussed in Indian media, the headlines went to the 3rd India-Nordic Summit in Oslo. The meetings were held with the leaders of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, the joint op-ed with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson,…
The Broadcaster That Lost Its Audience and Found a Poet There is a specific kind of institutional crisis that is harder to quantify than financial loss but far more existential: the loss of audience trust. Doordarshan, India’s national television broadcaster, was once the country’s only screen. It shaped the cultural imagination of three generations. It…
The Loom That Built an Economy Savitaben Patel has run a khadi weaving unit in Anand, Gujarat, for 21 years now. She employs 11 women from the surrounding neighbourhood. When she started, the unit’s annual turnover was under Rs. 8 lakhs. By FY 2025-26, it crossed Rs. 34 lakhs. There was no change in what…
01. The Quiet Revolution in Indian Homes Walk into an Indian household today, and you will encounter a world radically different from what existed just a generation ago. The sewing machine that once symbolised household enterprise sits alongside a washing machine; the radio that once connected families to the outside world has been displaced by…
India is preparing to count more than 1.4 billion people once again — but this time, the process itself is changing in major ways that could affect welfare delivery, policymaking, and democratic representation across the country. Why the census matters Every ten years, India undertakes one of the largest administrative exercises in the world. Census…
