Opinion

India lost 247 billion potential labour hours to extreme heat in 2024. Agriculture absorbed 66% of that loss. Construction accounted for 20%. The income equivalent, calculated by the Lancet Countdown in its 2025 report, was $194 billion. That figure was 124% higher than the annual...

When missiles fill the skies over West Asia, the tremors reach every household’s electricity and petrol bill. The ongoing crisis in the region has exposed the vulnerability of India, which is the world's third-largest consumer of crude oil, importing nearly 89% of its requirement, i.e....

Jewish history includes three episodes of flourishing in exile: the Babylonian diaspora’s great academies; the centuries-long experiment in Moorish and then Christian Spain; and the American Jewish experience, particularly after World War II. But the American experience has come under intensifying threat, and the causes...

Melvin Durai Insurance fraud is nothing new: it has existed since the days of the cavemen. That’s when a man named Bongah collected shiny stones from his fellow cavemen, as he convinced each of them to buy wife insurance. If someone steals your wife, he...

Claudia Sanhueza For decades, global power emanated from Europe and the United States. That was certainly my view when I first set foot in the Northern Hemisphere as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. But managing Chile’s international economic relations under former President...

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...