The First Name on the Document Laxmi Bai is the first person in her family to have a bank account in her own name. She is 41. Before the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana account was opened for her in 2016 at a banking correspondent’s stall in her village in Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh, money had…
The River That Remembers Nothing The Brahmaputra does not follow instructions. It shifts its course seasonally, erodes its banks annually, and has consumed Majuli by roughly 1/3rd of its original area over the past century. The communities on its banks have adapted as best they can, building on stilts, relocating seasonally, and accepting a negotiation…
The Biscuit That Changed a Village Economy Urmila Devi runs a small food processing unit outside Varanasi. She makes millet-based snacks using a government-supported machine, sells them under a cooperative label, and earns three times what she made from raw grain. Before her unit was set up under the PM Formalisation of Micro Food Processing…
The road that always took five hours Rajesh Bisht drives a goods vehicle between Delhi and Haridwar. He has done this route for fourteen years. The journey, on the old NH-58 and NH-334, takes between five and seven hours depending on traffic at Meerut, the condition of the Muzaffarnagar bypass, and whether there is a…
She has been watching the river her entire life Annapurna Devi has lived on the ghats of Varanasi for sixty-three years. She has watched the river in every season and every decade. She watched it in the years when it ran dark with effluents from tanneries upstream. She watched it after Namami Gange was launched…
The Geese that flew eleven thousand kilometres to find this lake Every winter, bar-headed geese make one of the most extraordinary journeys in the animal kingdom. It is a non-stop, high-altitude crossing of the Himalayas from their breeding grounds in Central Asia to their wintering sites in the Indian subcontinent. They fly at altitudes that…
The Loom that earns in Dollars but pays in rupees Mohammed Irfan has woven Banarasi silk for 23 years. His loom, in a narrow lane off Varanasi’s Kadipur neighbourhood, produces fabric at a rate that would satisfy any export order. What it does not produce is certainty. The price he receives per metre from the…
The Catch That Built An Empire Long before the Marine Products Export Development Authority issued its provisional data release on April 21, 2026, Lakshmi Raju had already spent the night at sea. She is a shrimp sorter at a processing unit in Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, the heartland of India’s frozen shrimp export industry. She works…
The Tournament and Everything Around It The 2026 FIFA World Cup is set to launch in June, and honestly, this thing is massive. Sixteen cities across the US, Canada, and Mexico will host matches, making it the biggest World Cup ever not just in countries involved, but also in total teams and games. Forty-eight nations…
The IAS Officer Who Noticed The Children Were Thin An IAS officer who had been deputed to Etapalli district, Gadchiroli, the tribal area of Maharashtra, visited the Todsa Ashram School in 2023. The records at the school indicated one thing, but what the officer witnessed contradicted those records. The students were being fed meals funded…
