Opinion

By Jayati Ghosh The Ouroboros, the ancient image of a serpent devouring its own tail, has long symbolized self-defeating strategies. It is thus an apt metaphor for US President Donald Trump’s current policies. His reckless and illegal war against Iran is the clearest example. Still,...

The much-touted economic strength of India has come into question. Not just because of reports of GDP overestimation but the future trend of growth, hampered by geopolitical conditions and the rising prices of oil and gas. Stagnant real wages and somewhat static manufacturing growth data...

The Reserve Bank of India’s bi-monthly Inflation Expectations Survey of households in March 2026 shows perceived inflation to be 7.2 per cent. This is more than double the official Consumer Price Index-based reading of 3.2 per cent for February. The CPI was revamped recently to...

On the night of April 12th, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán conceded defeat after 16 years in power, the crowds along the Danube began to chant. They did not reach for new words. They didn’t need to. They reached back four decades for words...

Melvin Durai Imagine you are waiting at a bus stop, reading something on your phone, when a student walks up. He’s also waiting for the bus. You look up from your phone and notice that he’s carrying a chemistry textbook and wearing a T-shirt with...

Maciej Kisilowski Tisza party’s success shows that even a highly entrenched regime can be defeated at the polls, despite institutional capture, media dominance, and electoral engineering. It provided proof of concept for the global new right, demonstrating that a politics opposed to human rights and...

Bhabani Shankar Nayak In society, the insidious politics of crony capitalism is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, supported by the reckless growth of AI and other technologies designed to dominate, domesticate, and dehumanise people and their societies. Alongside this, an illiberal politics of cowardice is...

Janak Raj The US dollar’s share in global foreign reserves peaked in 2001, and has been declining ever since. But while this trend is likely to continue, it is progressing very slowly, meaning that the greenback will retain its relative dominance—and the Global South will...

The Iran–Israel conflict has abruptly exposed the fault lines in India’s growth story—energy dependence, imported inflation, and policy vulnerability. With the Strait of Hormuz under threat, even a modest spike in crude prices can ripple through the economy, raising fuel costs, widening the trade deficit,...

Democracy is inherently fraught. At its core lies the difficulty of translating individual preferences into a coherent social choice, a problem famously captured by Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem and later developed by another Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, in his 1970 book Collective...