In a photo essay, farmers across five value chains share their hopes and concerns. While they are positive about future, many share concerns about climate shocks, trade policies and limited access to ...

Two new volumes on nature in India today “offer a nuanced understanding of India’s threatened ecosystems and the contested relationships between people and nature—an understanding that is essential if...

Delhi's uneven development restricts physical access to its mass public transport network. To remedy this, planners must consider solutions suited to the city's roadscape, rather than only expanding m...

The real costs of a contractualised teaching in universities are reduced diversity and burnt out teachers who no longer can practice a pedagogy of care.

‘Precisely because India remains a democracy, developments that increase the institutional cost of removing incumbents deserve attention before, rather than after, the democratic mechanism ceases to f...

The illegal wildlife trade in India is growing with primates emerging as significant commodities in this market. The complex and often violent processes involved in the trafficking of orangutans and g...

This is "a biography that tells us stories of PM Bhargava as a person, his growth as a scientist, his role as a scientific citizen, and most importantly of a person who tried to use science not just f...

Fieldwork in Delhi’s e-waste economy reveals why India’s EPR regime has not shifted physical flows. Certificate markets monetise documentation, not acquisition prices, letting cash-paying collectors o...

If India wants to be a technology leader rather than a technology assembler, advanced materials and the raw inputs that go into them have to be treated as a strategic bet. This will yield returns beyo...

Entrance and recruitment tests emerged to overcome the limitations of selecting candidates based on school board and university examinations. The solution has now become a much bigger problem. A remed...

Drones are being used to spray nutrients, and also herbicides and pesticides across both small and large holdings in Indian agriculture. The use is still small and geographically confined but it is sp...

As the latest UNEP reports point out, we will blow past 1.5 C in global temperature rise. To deal with that, we must prioritise solutions that work, rather than focusing on complex, unproven technolog...

India’s reported 64.7% surge in business R&D spending in the latest available data (2021-22) partly reflects expanded survey coverage rather than real corporate transformation. Before claiming a major...

In the first of an occasional column on the arts, artists and the creative life, Vidya Rao writes of her choice for the name of the column and what it signifies.

Nesal was where land, labour, caste and hierarchy were intertwined. Half a century later, caste differences remain but the social hierarchy has loosened. Some peasants have turned into programmers, ma...

The university is where the Constitution first teaches its future custodians the difference between an argument and an offence. Public order that depends on silence is not order at all; it is merely t...

As Indian cities modernise, street dogs have become symbols of competing ideas about urban space. From calls for removal to practices of care and coexistence, the debate over community dogs reveals de...

India’s race to build data centres is reshaping the country’s power system, raising difficult questions about energy, water and public resources.

A world tour of eras spanning pre-Partition to post-9/11, through the eyes of a pioneering Indian Muslim journalist in a leading Canadian paper.

There is much to be said for preparing a National Population Register as recommended by the UN. But the design of the 2026/27 Census form suggests that data for both the census and NPR will be collect...

Profiling advocates who shaped Indian law and yet remain unheralded by market-driven measures of eminence, Raju Ramachandran insists in his warm and anecdotal book that the lawyer as agent of change d...

A crisis mode of governance operates while addressing the twin problems of Delhi’s smog and stubble burning, resulting in unproven and counterproductive solutions being pushed onto farms.

A recent Supreme Court judgement wades into deciding who belongs or not to the SC and ST categories, and runs counter to Ambedkar's idea of fraternity: building a common brotherhood a shared national ...

As a strong El Niño evolves in 2026 alongside climate change, India’s monsoon is bringing uneven rainfall, compounding hot-dry extremes. This is disproportionately burdening farmers, fisherfolk, and m...

A verification exercise of the estimates of manufacturing in India’s new GDP series indicates that the over-estimation could be 24.5%-40.9%. The accuracy of the new estimates can be answered only when...

Sumit Sarkar’s engaged scholarly enterprise and sustained writings were no mere intellectual pursuit; he was passionately commitment to social democracy.

D.D. Kosambi was a polymath genius—mathematician, historian, numismatist, archaeologist—whose brilliance was inseparable from his volatile temperament and who eventually retreated into a concealed alt...

In India, despite ample legal reforms, marriage remains stubbornly sacramental, and divorce, a social stigma. Marital death is not an outlier but a social fact. By giving the institution of divorce it...

Besides laying down unrealistic targets for receipts from sale, India’s disinvestment, strategy continues to prioritise liquidation of profitable PSUs, which converts recurring dividend income into on...

"Despite different institutional logics, judgements and cinematic representations produce remarkably similar accounts of political violence. They ultimately reaffirm the legitimacy of existing institu...

As the only gateway to un-inherited opportunity for most Indians, the public entrance exam is a critical institution. But we have worshipped its form and ignored its social roles. The GenZ protests ha...

Odisha’s beaches face unregulated tourism pressures degrading fragile ecosystems, evident in declining ghost crab populations and rising litter. Without science-based zoning and recognition of informa...

West Bengal’s BJP government marks a shift from Mamata Banerjee’s negotiation-based “franchisee politics” towards hierarchical “command politics”. Guided by RSS discipline, this reordering privileges ...

India’s eastern border sustains two political imaginations: a security frontier and a labour frontier of everyday survival. With the security logic now dominating, categories meant for foreigners beco...

Conservation law has no register to value landscapes sustained by a community's sense of duty. The default instinct to fold these landscapes into familiar administrative categories erases the relation...

This collection of essays by Yogendra Yadav, “forces us to confront the foundational questions: what does it mean to be an Indian? Can democracy survive without the moral glue of fraternity? But the b...

A recent series of essays published in The India Forum breaks down what the youth protests mean for how politics will be conducted in India going forward.

India offers informal workers 20 overlapping schemes through the e-Shram portal, but its flagship pension scheme has reached just 51 lakh of the 31 crore who have registered. Income volatility and fra...

The CJP refuses to fit old categories: apolitical versus political, satire versus protest, virtual versus physical, domestic versus diasporic. This is exactly what makes it a bellwether for how young ...

Vijay’s carefully constructed boy-man image made him a point of intersection for different kinds of voter discontents in Tamil Nadu, explaining why the DMK lost in the state.

"Awards are now routinely given to individuals and works that do undisguised PR for this government, or distort history, or further majoritarianism, while inciting animosity towards religious minoriti...

When professionals manage the 'industry' of politics, what happens to party politics and democracy? A new study offers food for thought.

A student who is also an activist speaks of the injustice they see in educational institutions and society, and the economic bleakness that awaits them when they leave university in an India that to t...

“Somewhere a child not yet born will walk into an examination hall on an honest morning, under a sky these young people tore open years before and will never know whose rain it was that fell so that t...

The student demand for accountability could not be suppressed by police brutality; it instead grew stronger and spread across the country. It speaks of a revival of a democratic voice against the stat...

A new biography of Shankar Guha Niyogi valuably maps his fusion of Marxist and Gandhian thought, foregrounding the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha’s distinctive politics. However, it fails to explore the te...

The 16th Finance Commission’s narrow Terms of Reference acknowledged deep political-economic tensions between India’s richer, less populous peninsula and poorer, more populous north. But its formula c...

The student demand for accountability could not be suppressed by police brutality; it instead grew stronger and spread across the country. It speaks of a revival of a democratic voice against the stat...

The emergence of the Bnei Menashe among the Christianised Kuki-Chin-Mizos of Manipur and Mizoram is an intriguing story of how a community imagines itself as a ‘Lost Tribe’ and with the support of Ame...