Opinion

Luciene Pereira The standard policy response to slums—relocate people, bulldoze the settlement, and build public housing elsewhere—is older than the slums themselves. It has never worked. The logic seems straightforward. Slums are viewed as unsanitary, unsafe, and visually jarring. If you want to build a...

Lekha Rattanani The death penalty awarded to nine policemen for the custodial killings of a trader and his son earlier this month will stand out as the biggest strike for accountability and against injustice in a system that has mostly trivialised the lives of those...

By Shivaji Sarkar The Iran war is hurting India more than it could ever imagine. It’s hitting gas supplies, NRI remittances, FDI and causing immense losses to the RBI. As of April 2026, the RBI burnt approximately $40 billion in foreign exchange reserves to defend...

Krzysztof Płomiski An update on the American-Israeli attack on Iran, launched on 28 February and carried out outside the framework of regional law, marks a new phase in the broader Middle East, with implications for global events. For the affected region, the war signals the...

Avilash Roul In the absence of an official explanation on India’s quiet withdrawal from hosting the earlier wished UN climate summit in 2028, it’s anybody’s guess now. Not the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change (MOEFCC) of India, the focal point for the UN...

By Santosh Kumar Mohapatra India stands today at a defining crossroads in its democratic journey. While the promise of gender equality and women’s empowerment is loudly proclaimed, its actual realization continues to be quietly deferred. The renewed debate on women’s reservation, despite being presented as...

By DK Giri When South Korean President Lee Jae-Myung landed in New Delhi on April 19, 2026, it wasn’t just another photo-op at Rashtrapati Bhavan. It was the third time he and Prime Minister Narendra Modi met in 12 months, but the first time as...

By Dhurjati Mukherjee India is likely to see below-average monsoon rains for the first time in three years in 2026, the government stated recently, stoking concerns over farm output and growth in Asia’s third-largest economy as it battles inflation due to the West Asian conflict....

By Rajdeep Sardesai Reading the inscrutable mind of PM Narendra Modi is always a hazardous exercise. Which is why it remains unclear why the BJP-led government chose this moment to revisit the implementation of the women’s reservation law, passed with much fanfare in 2023. Was...

By Todd G. Buchholz Most schoolchildren learn that the Earth is roughly 25,000 miles around (40,000 kilometres). They do not learn that the global economy depends on just 100 of those miles. Blocking two narrow waterways—the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait—can send the...