A CITY IS NEVER FINISHED There is a particular kind of civic grief that belongs to Indian cities. It is the grief of being perpetually almost-there. Almost-planned. Almost-drained. Almost-resilient. On June 13, 2026, at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi, the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) turned 50. It looked forward, with the urgency of a…
A TANK COMMANDER AT THE TOP The year was 1997, the last time an officer from the Indian Army’s Armoured Corps stood at the apex of the service. General Shankar Roy Chowdhury had just retired. The world was a different place with no drones, no precision-guided munitions, no cyber warfare doctrine. 29 years later, on…
THE SOUND OF PROGRESS There is something deeply honest about wind energy. Unlike a coal plant, it needs no fuel. Unlike a dam, it does not submerge valleys. It simply spins quietly, relentlessly and converts movement into electricity. On June 15, 2026, the Global Wind Day Conference convened in Goa under the theme ‘Wind Energy:…
Vimla Bahuguna (1932- 2025), the veteran environmentalist, combined grounded constructive work with far-reaching sociopolitical activism. From her home in the Himalayas, she built up resistance to deforestation, big dams, destructive mining, commercial forestry, violence and abuse. During the 1970s,along with thousands of local women, she created the Chipko movement, which reverberated across the globe. Today,…
Every AI query has a physical footprint – and it is measured in something far more scarce than electricity The query you send to a chatbot seems like nothing. Not using any paper, fuel or obvious resources in any way. However, behind your query, deep inside some climate-controlled data centre full of buzzing computers, there’s…
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…
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…
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,…
