On June 5, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Robin Khuda, the founder and CEO of AirTrunk, at his New Delhi office. What followed was an announcement that set a new benchmark for foreign investment in India’s digital economy. Modi announced AirTrunk’s plans to invest around Rs 3 lakh crore (USD 30 billion) in India…
The India Meteorological Department’s revised forecast for 2026 places the southwest monsoon at its weakest in over a decade and the consequences will ripple from paddy fields to grocery shelves. The onset of the monsoons is as significant an annual event as the results of any election and as much talked about as any budget…
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…
