Opinion

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...

India designs transformative policy with striking regularity — and then watches it dissolve between the drafting table and the last mile. The causes are structural: fragmented institutions, uneven capacity, broken coordination between political offices and implementing agencies, and incentives that reward announcement over execution. The...

The viral DoorDash driver who delivered two bags of McDonald’s to President Donald Trump in the White House on 13 April is a Republican woman campaigning against a “tax on tips” in the US. Sharon Simmons from Fayetteville, Arkansas, a 58-year old grandmother of 10...

Funds of funds (FoF) are increasingly used to shape how governments practice economic statecraft. When designed well, they pool capital to invest in venture funds rather than directly in individual companies or securities, strengthening innovation ecosystems while steering investment toward strategically important markets, capabilities, and...

Bertrand Badré & Saurabh Mishra For most of the postwar era, global power was defined by alliances, aircraft carriers, and reserve currencies. But we are now entering an era defined by critical infrastructure and those who finance, build, and operate it. Ports, power grids, rail...