In the space business, the hardest part often comes after you’ve built the thing.

You’ve made something clever in the lab. Now it has to become a product someone will actually buy — years of testing, tweaking and proving it won’t fail in orbit.

That long, expensive slog is where most deep-tech ideas quietly succumb, because private investors won’t wait that long and the only early customer is usually the government.

There’s a name for this graveyard: the valley of death.

On 11 June, IN-SPACe announced the first three companies it’s helping across it — Bengaluru’s Astrobase and SatSure, and Hyderabad’s TM2SPACE — under its Rs 500 crore Technology Adoption Fund.

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The fund is cannily built. It picks up to 60 per cent of a project’s bill — capped at Rs 25 crore — to carry a technology from “works in the lab” to “ready to sell.” The government takes no stake in the company. The founders keep the IP. It simply earns its money back over time, through a share of whatever the product eventually sells.

The only catches: you can’t use this money to build the thing with foreign partners, and you need IN-SPACe’s nod before licensing the technology to anyone else, at home or abroad.

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Look at what got funded and a pattern jumps out.

Astrobase is building a powerful, reusable rocket engine — one of the trickiest designs in the world, with very few built anywhere — and is already firing it on the test stand.

SatSure is building Dhaarini, what it calls India’s first sovereign Earth-intelligence model — an AI trained on India’s own monsoons, farms and cities to make sense of the flood of satellite images India collects: spotting stressed crops, tracking floods, keeping an eye on infrastructure.

TM2SPACE is making the small star-reading sensors that keep a satellite pointed the right way.

An engine, a brain, and a sense of direction — three things India has struggled to build well enough at home. Which is the whole point: the fund exists to cut that dependence.

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The design is clever. Now let’s do the maths. SatSure’s grant came to Rs 24.6 crore — just shy of the cap — and the three were chosen from 43 proposals. At Rs 25 crore a pop, the entire Rs 500 crore pot can back only about 20 projects over five years — and so far, 16 months in, it has backed three. Hold that against the dream it’s attached to: a $44 billion space economy by 2034, talk of India becoming the world’s third great space power after the US and China, a separate Rs 1,000 crore venture fund.

Union Minister Jitendra Singh has put the logic plainly — India can’t out-spend China on science, so it has to win on brains instead.

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That’s exactly what this fund is: small, sharp, founder-friendly, aimed squarely at the spot where Indian deep-tech — or actually, deep-tech anywhere — keeps stalling.

The Tamil Nadu Governor’s office recently released a crudely altered image of the seer-poet Thiruvalluvar in saffron robes, vibhuti, and rudraksha, layered over K.R. Venugopal Sarma’s iconic 1959 portrait.

The impulse was sound. The execution was almost designed to fail. A legitimate cultural assertion has been handed back to its critics in a form that confirms every charge of political instrumentalisation.

The Sarma painting is no incidental piece of state iconography. The artist spent nearly three decades preparing it, drawing on Shastric principles to depict Thiruvalluvar as a grihastha, a householder-sage in jada-makuta and uthariya.

Sarma was a Gandhian, deeply versed in classical iconography, and his portrait was accepted by the Congress-era Madras government in 1959. The Government of India placed it on a postage stamp in 1960.

The image belongs to a Tamil cultural mainstream that predates Dravidianism’s narrower racial reading of Valluvar by decades.

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To add saffron to that portrait is to overwrite the artist’s deliberate choices. Saffron is the colour of the sannyasi, and the householder-sage Thiruvalluvar was never one.

The earlier Mylapore stone idol, dated by the late Iravatam Mahadevan to the 15th or 16th century, similarly shows him in padmasana with palm-leaf manuscripts, every detail confirming the householder-sage archetype.

The colonial-era Francis Ellis coin of 1818 had drawn him as a Jain-style ascetic, and that depiction has fallen out of tradition. Returning to it through clumsy photoshopping is regression masquerading as assertion.

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The honest reclamation is available, and far more powerful. Tamil tradition holds that Valluvar belonged to the Paraiyar community, and that Valluvar itself designated the priestly and astrological lineage within it.

Gustav Oppert documented in 1893 that the Valluvar Purohits wore the yajnopavitam by right, performed Sanskrit ceremonies at Paraiyar and Pallar weddings, and were respectfully consulted by Brahman families on matters of astrology.

The anthropologist Michael Moffatt, working in Tamil Nadu in the 1970s, found the same continuity intact. The sixteenth-century text Gnana Vettiyan, attributed to Thiruvalluvar himself, asserts the community’s right to the sacred thread and the inner dignity it signifies.

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What the Governor’s office should have done, with care and scholarship, was to restore the yajnopavitam to the portrait.

That single change would have carried a historical claim no saffron robe ever can. It would have shown, in quiet visual truth, that the highest ethical voice in Tamil civilisation emerged from a community once labelled outcaste by colonial reduction, and that the community has been a full participant in Hindu sacred life all along.

What is at stake reaches beyond the colour of a robe. The question is whether Hindu cultural reclamation can rise to the seriousness of the inheritance it claims to defend. The yajnopavitam across Thiruvalluvar’s shoulder would have answered that question, and answered it without spectacle.

Based on “Thiruvalluvar: The Case For A Yajnopavitam, Not Saffron Robes“ by Aravindan Neelakandan.

About a fortnight ago, Vijay Gokhale, former Indian foreign secretary, observed that China sees Indian democracy as a long-term ideological problem. The Chinese commentary that followed went to lengths explaining why India does not matter, why Indian democracy was a curse, and why Indian aspirations exceed Indian means.

This vehemence itself is the story, because indifference does not produce a dozen essay-length tweets of correction.

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Stripped of theatrics, the argument is the one Chinese strategists and think-tanks have refined for two decades. India, the line goes, has built first-world aspirations on a third-world base. Universal suffrage in 1950 froze pre-modern hierarchies into governance and let identity-based tribalism hijack reform. Democracy, the conclusion offers, is what makes India unserious.

The diagnosis does carry some truth. The prescription is where it falls apart. Beijing repeats it with the urgency of a country reassuring itself rather than analysing another.

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That India does not matter to China is, oddly enough, the most successful Chinese narrative export to India, repeated by several CCP watchers in Delhi. The record of CCP’s conduct says otherwise.

Beijing helped Pakistan with Nukes in the 80s and 90s and even today arms it against India. It does something as petty as blocking the UN listing of Masood Azhar as a terrorist before finally relenting in 2019. It backs insurgent groups in India’s Northeast for decades. It dismisses Mao’s Five Fingers doctrine while behaving otherwise in every border dispute. It keeps prodding into the Indian Ocean. The current instrument of coercion is rare earth magnets — where China commands 91% of global output — and other supply chains.

So why is a neighbour considered irrelevant given this much attention?

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What Beijing actually fears is far plainer than the rhetoric admits.

A billion-plus society of comparable civilisational depth, incomparable internal diversity, and modest but growing resources is, every five years, choosing its rulers, absorbing its contradictions, and continuing to grow.

Two decades of neutralising democratic experiments in China's near abroad, from Hong Kong to Tibet, have not given Beijing a template for India. The Party's case to its own people, that prosperity requires the suspension of choice, becomes harder to sustain the longer India continues to hold together.

The Indian economy crossed Japan’s in 2025. It has been the fastest growing major economy while in the same period China has come dangerously close to being a ‘Peaking Power’.

None of this requires Indians to argue with Chinese commentariat. India only has to do one thing — keep functioning.

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Swarajya has diagnosed the cost of Indian democracy before.

India democratised at 18% literacy, defying every comparable case, and has paid for it. Still does. But that there was no other way for India is also true. No way to be united in the 1950s except through democracy, no way to be democratic except through universal franchise.

Even with hundreds of languages and identities, India had a strong civilisational glue, but what about polity? Democracy gave it the polity and a unified statehood. Even sympathetic Chinese commentary concedes, when pressed and with some lament, that democracy has served as India’s safety valve.

The Indian task is to be a hard state inside the democratic frame, building industrial scale, human capital, and a private sector disciplined enough to compete.

As for China, a country at ease with its own model would not spend this much effort talking another out of theirs.

Inputs from “Why Premature Democracy Still Haunts India... And What To Do Now?” by .

For months, the Trump administration had been squeezing India over its purchases of Russian oil, and Reliance — India’s biggest oil buyer — was right in the crosshairs.

• Then Reliance committed money to a refinery project in Texas, and the pressure eased. The tariffs came down, a trade deal followed, and a company Washington had been attacking became a partner.

• There are questions swirling about how it all came together - but the basic manoeuvre is one that countries and companies have been running for a very long time.

The corner it was in:

• By August 2025, Washington had doubled its tariffs on India to 50% — about as harsh as it gets — just to punish India for buying cheap Russian crude.

• Navarro, the trade adviser, was out there in public pointing fingers at India’s “politically connected energy titans.”

• And think about what was at stake: nearly $87 billion of Indian exports, almost a fifth of the country’s goods trade, suddenly on the chopping block. Officials were warning that if India walked away from Russian barrels, crude could spike toward $200.

This was a national problem - it brings together business, national economy and security concerns all in one thread.

What Reliance did: Reliance simply pledged capital into a Texas refinery - and just like that, the adversary had skin in the game. Within months the tariff penalty was gone, a trade deal was signed, the sanctions waivers came through. Bloomberg even called it: foe to friend.

The pattern behind it: This is not new. Marrying business to national strategy is just how great powers have always operated.

• In 1945, with the war ending, Franklin Roosevelt met Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz on a US warship in the Suez Canal and struck a simple bargain: American protection in exchange for access to Saudi oil. The company that pumped it, Aramco, was American-owned — so a private oil firm became the living link holding the two countries together.

• The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and, guess what, turned the place into a market for American factories.

• Today TSMC is sinking $165 billion into Arizona fabs as insurance against the very threat its chips are meant to deter.

Reliance may have its troubles elsewhere. But on this one - it read the board and moved at exactly the right moment.

Ever since the NEET-UG paper leak scandal erupted, the public conversation has settled on the Education Ministry as the villain. That story is emotionally satisfying and not without its logic but it misses a critical fact.

The ministry now facing the loudest criticism spent nearly eight years — across two separate leak controversies — trying to move NEET to a Computer-Based Test format.

The strongest resistance came from elsewhere, and it came twice.

The First Block: 2018

In July 2018, the then HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar announced that the newly created National Testing Agency would conduct major entrance examinations in computer-based mode. NEET too was slated to move online and be conducted twice a year.

But within a month, the plan was shelved — because the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare objected. The ministry argued that rural students would be disadvantaged by an online examination and raised concerns about additional stress from multiple exam cycles.

NEET would continue on paper, specifically at the Health Ministry's request.

Every other major competitive examination in India had already moved to CBT. JEE Main, CUET, NEET-PG, banking, railways, SSC recruitment — all digital. NEET alone was held back.

The Second Block: 2024–2025

When the 2024 NEET-UG paper leak triggered nationwide protests, a Supreme Court intervention, and the removal of the NTA chief, the case for CBT became impossible to argue against.

The Radhakrishnan Committee, formed in the aftermath, submitted recommendations in October 2024 strongly favouring a shift to CBT as the preferred mode to reduce leak risk.

Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan publicly stated in November 2024 that the transition was "in all likelihood" moving forward. The Education Ministry began implementation planning.

The Health Ministry and the National Medical Commission resisted again — this time citing concerns over equity, infrastructure gaps, and score normalisation across multiple exam shifts.

The Scandal That Forced the Obvious

On 3 May 2026, the paper leaked again. Within days, a national controversy had erupted, the examination was cancelled, and the matter was back before the Supreme Court.

On 15 May, Pradhan announced that NEET would move permanently to CBT from 2027. The position the Health Ministry had blocked twice in eight years became government policy in a matter of weeks.

India had the solution in 2018, rejected it, paid for it in 2024, rejected it again, and spent 2026 paying the bill a second time.

CBT brings its own challenges — normalisation, cybersecurity, infrastructure — but those are implementation problems. Paper leaks are structural ones.

The question Parliament should now ask is not why CBT is finally being introduced. It is who bears responsibility for the two occasions it was blocked, and what those decisions cost.

When the Ministry of Culture posted a picture of the Pashupati seal on X, calling it evidence of unbroken Indian civilisational continuity, it was met with frothing reactions from across the border and promptly ‘corrected’ by a corner of Western academia that the figure was probably an Iranian deity that Indian observers had read as proto-Shiva.

Four days later, MoC did something pleasantly unexpected. It doubled down and came back with a 4,500-year-old terracotta dice from “the Indus-Saraswati Civilization” and a line worth memorising: “Civilizational inheritance is not just about geography or ruins, it is defined by living customs, symbols, rituals, and unbroken cultural consciousness.”

For decades, the Indian state, when it bothered to speak of its civilisational past at all, did so in the apologetic manner of a guest at someone else’s seminar. Two posts in five days suggest a change. Something rarer. A preemptive strike on the narrative, made by a ministry that had its share of brickbats for not possessing civilisational instinct. No longer did it wish to be told what its civilisation was. It had to tell the story itself.

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The loud counters that came from Pakistan are a symptom of a peculiar national pastime that has matured into a full-blown industry.

In the same month as the seal episode, Pakistani classical dance circuits held the country’s first Kathak festival in Lahore and rebranded Kathak, Odissi and Bharatanatyam as having sprung from the “Indus Valley” and therefore from “this part of the world.”

Pakistani wedding reels routinely showcase Haldi, Sangeet, Varmala, Garba, Dandiya, the diya and the aarti as elegant traditions with the source label peeled off.

The argument underneath the appropriation, however, is incoherent on its own terms. The Mecca-MohenjoDaro contradiction is so structural that Pakistan has stopped noticing it. Cite Mohenjo-Daro as proof of antiquity. Cite imagined Arab and Turkic bloodlines as proof of pure faith. Cite whichever uncle the occasion demands.

A polity that styles itself protector of Mecca and Medina, situated deserts and oceans away, whose theology has always taken civilisational belonging to flow through the sword of faith, which defines itself by conversion away from the subcontinent’s pre-Islamic past, cannot simultaneously walk back and claim that past as its own. It cannot now claim the Indus Valley by present-day cartography.

The very theology that grants Pakistan its kinship with Mecca forbids it kinship with Mohenjo-Daro. The grandparents cannot be repudiated as kafirs in one breath and resurrected as ancestors in the next. Heritage is not a buffet from which the inconvenient theological dish may be skipped.

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However, the cunningness lies in the next step, and the pattern repeats too cleanly to be a coincidence.

After the appropriation comes the distortion. The Pashupati seal is reread as a hand-me-down and attributed to a “proto-Elamite” iconography or to a generic Eurasian Lord of the Beasts. The dance traditions become “South Asian classical arts.” Yoga becomes generic “South Asian wellness.” Sacred rituals are branded as “aesthetics.”

The final move is the stripping. The Dharmic is recast as “South Asian” and “secular”, the distinctly Indian as the “common heritage of humanity”. By the time the recasting is done, the practitioners are incidental.

The terminal step is the cleverest. “South Asian” presents itself as neutral. It performs as a scalpel. The phrase excises Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh genealogies from the practices those traditions invented and sustained, and presents the residue as everyone’s.

The line one hears is that yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism. The same will eventually be said of the seal and Shiva, of the Indus-Saraswati Civilisation. Once that move is permitted, the original culture cannot defend its ownership without sounding chauvinist.

The Dharmic substrate of the inheritance is not allowed to remain, because it falsifies the founding myth of the Pakistani state. So the substrate is washed off.

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Inside Pakistan, the same instinct runs yet another parallel campaign.

The Lahore Authority for Heritage Revival set out to restore the pre-Partition names of Lahore’s streets and neighbourhoods. Islampura would become Krishan Nagar again; Jain Mandir Chowk would carry its old signboard. The project was budgeted, endorsed by editorials at home, and advertised abroad as evidence of an inclusive, civilisationally confident Pakistan.

Though the advertised inclusivity, disguised as restoration, could not survive its inception. The plan was quietly deferred when Islamist groups and a band of social-media vloggers registered their displeasure. The Hindu heritage gets reclaimed when it flatters the brand abroad and is dropped for Islamists at home.

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What the Ministry of Culture did, almost in passing, was decline to participate in this game. Its case rested on continuity. The inheritance belongs to India because India never let go of the practice — the mudras carved on the seal are still danced, the fire on the altars at Kalibangan is still lit at every yajna, the dice of the Vedic gambler’s hymn still rolls in every household before Diwali, and the morning prayers at every temple.

Geography is merely the accident of where ruins happen to fall. The civilisational thread the dice and the seal point to is the thread of the Saraswati flowing through the Ghaggar-Hakra basin where the largest concentration of these sites still lies. The proper name, which the Ministry’s own caption uses, is Sindhu-Saraswati. The river has dried. The civilisation has not. By that test the civilisational verdict was settled four millennia ago.

The two posts may mark the beginnings of an Indian state that has stopped apologising for the obvious. The pushback will keep arriving, as ‘academia’ from one direction and appropriation from the other. Sometimes, also from within. The work now is to make confidence and ownership the standing posture, not the exception.

There is a version of the ongoing UP power crisis story that fits neatly into the usual political template — government fails, people suffer, opposition scores points. That story is not wrong as much as it is incomplete.
For one, here is what the numbers actually say.

Uttar Pradesh supplied around 31,803 MW of electricity against a peak demand of 31,804 MW this month. The state has, for all practical purposes, matched its highest-ever electricity demand. A decade ago, that would have been unthinkable. The generation problem — the one that kept UP dark through the 1990s and 2000s — has largely been solved.

And yet, the lights are going out for many hours at a stretch in Lucknow's suburbs. Protests and demonstrations have broken out across districts. BJP MLAs have publicly raised concerns with their own government.

The electricity exists. It is simply not reaching the people.

Transformers are failing under loads they were not built to carry. Distribution networks designed for a different era are buckling. Repair crews are understaffed. When thermal plants go offline for maintenance — pulling 3,000 to 4,500 MW out of the daily balance — the slack that a healthier distribution system might absorb instead cascades into unscheduled cuts.

This is a Level 2 problem. Level 1 — build enough power — was the defining infrastructure challenge of the previous two decades. Level 2 is quieter, less heroic, and in some ways harder: upgrade every substation, every transformer, every last-mile wire in a state of close to 25 crore people, faster than the demand growth.

It does not generate the same political momentum that building a power plant does. There is no ribbon to cut on a replaced transformer.

But this is where the next decade of India's energy policy will be won or lost — not in generation capacity announcements, but in the unglamorous work of making sure the electricity that exists actually arrives.

America’s LNG investments are too big to fail. And that fact alone has turned US foreign policy into a market-share enforcement machine.

The United States is tripling its LNG export capacity by 2030. Hundreds of billions of dollars are already committed. Terminals under construction, pipelines laid, contracts signed. Money of this magnitude needs buyers, preferably buyers who have nowhere else to go.

Any competitor that shows up threatens to sink the whole thing.

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In 2024, America, Australia, and Qatar together controlled over 60 per cent of global LNG trade. Canada has two projects underway, aiming for 10 per cent by 2030. Together, this American-led bloc could meet virtually all global demand by decade’s end.

Now look at who’s sitting on the gas but not allowed to sell it. Russia holds the world’s largest natural gas reserves, roughly equal to America, Australia, and Qatar put together. Its share of global LNG exports? Eight per cent.

Iran has nearly as much gas as Russia. Its LNG market share is zero. Venezuela, Iraq, Libya, Kuwait, all sitting on enormous reserves, all exporting zero LNG.

That gap has been enforced, country by country, for two decades.

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Russia got sanctions and a proxy war in Ukraine that severed its gas pipelines to Europe.

Iran got decades of sanctions, a nuclear deal that was never meant to succeed, and then a third Gulf war, conveniently timed after it signed a $40 billion LNG terminal deal with Russia.

Venezuela got regime-change operations, after which American companies were handed rights to develop Venezuelan gas fields by routing them through Trinidad and Tobago’s infrastructure.

Yemen’s French-built LNG terminal was shut down by the Houthi uprising.

Mozambique discovered vast gas reserves in 2015 and ran into Islamist terrorism two years later, stalling an Indo-French LNG project for a decade.

Every country that tried entering the LNG export market without American approval found itself at war, in internal conflict, under sanctions, or all.

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Europe is bearing the cost most visibly.

It was shoved off cheap Russian piped gas, available next door, and onto American LNG that costs two to five times more. Over 190,000 companies went bankrupt across Western Europe in 2024. Steel and fertiliser plants are shutting permanently. The International Energy Agency says half the industrial gas demand lost during 2022-23 won’t come back because the factories that consumed it no longer exist. The colonisers have become the colonised.

China sees what’s happening and is moving fast. More piped gas from Russia, domestic production up 30 per cent since 2020. India is diversifying hard across UAE, Qatar, North America, Mozambique, and Russia, making sure no single bloc gets a chokehold on its supply.

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America has turned hydrocarbons into its single largest export category and built an entire geopolitical architecture around protecting it. The capacity is being built. Every cubic metre needs a buyer who has nowhere else to turn. So rivals with reserves stay offline, allies stay locked in, and the wars that enforce the whole arrangement keep grinding on.

Every LNG terminal under construction in Louisiana or Texas has a corresponding conflict burning somewhere to keep it profitable. That can’t last forever. But the damage it does on the way down could reshape the global order for a generation.

Based on “The Gas Wars Are Here: America’s Quest To Own LNG Empire Rests On Conflict, Not Competition” by Venu Gopal Narayanan | Read the original

There is a particular kind of Indian diplomat, retired, comfortable, fluent in the language of nuance, who has spent decades ensuring that Pakistan never pays the full price for its terrorism. The method is always the same. After each atrocity, this class counsels restraint, proposes a fresh dialogue track, and frames continued engagement as the sophisticated response. The vocabulary rotates; the function does not. Absorb the shock, propose a process, let the moment of accountability pass, repeat.

Nirupama Menon Rao, former Foreign Secretary of India, has just offered the latest iteration of this service.

In a series of posts on X, Rao declared the India-Pakistan relationship trapped in a “single script: territory, terror, recrimination,” repeated with “ritual precision” and yielding “diminishing returns.” Her prescription: parallel tracks of engagement in West Asia, energy cooperation, diaspora welfare, maritime stability, and, with a flourish, a “women’s caucus” animated by women’s “ingrained common sense.” She branded it “insulation, not transformation,” as though the rebrand were itself the argument.

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What Rao airily dismisses as a single script is a set of facts, and the consequences of discarding them deserve to be stated plainly.

If territory is a rhetorical habit, then Pakistan’s occupation of Kashmir is simply the status quo, to be managed rather than reversed, which is, of course, Islamabad’s preferred position.

If terror is a talking point that yields diminishing returns, then India should stop raising it, which grants Pakistan the only thing its terror infrastructure has ever needed: impunity.

And if accountability is mere recrimination, then the dead of Pahalgam and Mumbai are reduced to diplomatic baggage, an embarrassment to be set aside so that sophisticated people may get on with the business of engagement.

Rao does not state these conclusions. She does not need to. They are the only destination her logic permits, and a former Foreign Secretary ought to know where her own argument leads.

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Since when do the women of India want anything different from the men of India when it comes to the Pakistani problem? At Pahalgam, newlywed husbands were shot in the head while their brides, still wearing wedding bangles, watched. Did the widows of Pahalgam grieve differently because of their gender? Did the mothers and widows of soldiers killed along the LoC across three decades desire “women’s caucuses” and “parallel tracks”?

When terror did discriminate based on gender, it was worse for Indian women.

The terrorists at Pahalgam spared the women because the logic of Pakistan’s terror ecosystem has always carried a specific, gendered cruelty: kill the men, render the women as spoils. In 1990, loudspeakers atop mosques across the Kashmir Valley blared through the freezing dark: Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san, we want Pakistan, with Hindu women, but without their men. A promise of conquest and enslavement, directed explicitly at women.

The argument that gender can cut through what decades of statecraft could not is also historically illiterate.

Benazir Bhutto, Oxford-educated, photogenic, globally hailed as the face of progressive Muslim leadership, sponsored the JKLF’s escalation into full-blown insurgency in Kashmir. Under her watch, the Taliban were created with ISI support.

On a visit to Muzaffarabad in 1990, she exhorted a crowd to chop the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir into pieces, jag-jag, mo-mo, han-han, slicing the air with her hand to leave no ambiguity. She screamed azadi slogans, called Kashmiris the blood of mujahids and ghazis, and effectively lit the fuse for the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits. On the Indian side, it was during a woman’s Prime Ministership that India broke Pakistan into two. Gender has never determined strategic behaviour. There is no reason to pretend it does now.

As Arshia Malik, herself a Kashmiri Muslim woman, has pointed out, the elite women of Pakistan provide intellectual and rhetorical cover for the jihadi apparatus of their own military-industrial complex, even as ordinary Pakistani women suffer under Hudood laws, honour killings, blasphemy accusations, forced conversions, and the quiet genocide of Baloch communities. A “women’s caucus” bridging a gap rooted in the Pakistani state’s use of terror as an instrument of policy does not deserve serious engagement. It deserves derision.

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The most instructive part of this episode, however, is the applause.

Within hours of Rao’s thread on the Iran war, Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s former Foreign Minister, quote-tweeted it, calling it “strategic clarity” and expressing “deep nostalgia.” She hoped “the current trend is an aberration and not the final chapter of South Asia’s destiny.” The next day, replying directly to Khar’s endorsement, Rao proposed the parallel tracks, described them as “insulation, not transformation,” and concluded: “The women must speak.”

Let us be precise about who was applauding. Khar, who just months ago called India a “belligerent, rogue, terrorist state.” Who told a press conference in Islamabad that “no country has used terrorism better than India.” Who, after Operation Sindoor, accused India of “setting a dangerous new criteria” for the region. She now gazes upon Rao’s thread and feels nostalgia, and one can see why.

What Khar misses is the diplomatic class to which Rao belongs, the class that staffed track-II dialogues and bankrolled peace initiatives while the deep state ran the terror pipeline without so much as a polite pause. Those processes gave Pakistan cover, optics, and time. Khar misses those Indians because they were useful. They kept the game going while Pakistan never had to fold.

One does not need to speculate about whether Rao’s proposal serves Pakistan’s interests. Pakistan’s own former Foreign Minister confirmed it, publicly and enthusiastically, within hours.

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Rao, to her credit, anticipates the objection that any engagement risks being instrumentalised. She knows the counter well enough to state it herself. She simply believes the word “insulation” is sufficient to retire it.

It is not. Insulation requires a partner who respects boundaries, and Pakistan has not respected a single one across seven decades: not at Agra, not after Mumbai, not after Pathankot, and not after Pahalgam. Every insulated track India has opened has been converted, with practised efficiency, into a concession extracted while the terror infrastructure hummed along undisturbed.

Rao herself has form. In 2012, barely four years after 166 people were killed in Mumbai by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the diplomatic establishment that Rao led was planning to sell electricity to Pakistan even while India could not generate enough for its own demand. This instinct is consistent: engage first, assess later, and treat scepticism as a failure of imagination rather than a product of lived experience.

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The women of India did not need a caucus. The widows who watched their husbands shot through the skull were not waiting for parallel tracks with the country that made them widows. They wanted what decades of this diplomatic gentility have deferred: a price, paid in full.

Rao’s hubris is naive at best and callous at worst. She is auditioning, whether she knows it or not, for exactly the role Islamabad needs. An Indian voice that buys time and ensures the cost of terrorism never quite arrives at Pakistan’s door. Wrapping that audition in the language of women’s empowerment does not soften it. It mocks the women who suffered most from it.

India’s most vulnerable chokepoint — twenty-two kilometres of land connecting the mainland to eight northeastern states — just got two new governors. One is a career IB officer who spent decades studying how border populations migrate, settle, and redraw political maps. The other commanded Kashmir’s Chinar Corps during its worst years.

Everyone’s talking about a new Union Territory. They’re watching the wrong hand.

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Between 25 February and 6 March, three things happened in quick succession. Amit Shah arrived in Seemanchal for a closed-door security tour. R.N. Ravi, whose official IB profile lists his specialisation as the political sociology of border populations, was moved from Tamil Nadu to West Bengal’s Raj Bhavan. Lieutenant General Syed Ata Hasnain, architect of Kashmir’s Hearts Doctrine, was named Bihar’s governor. Both appointments dropped within twenty-four hours of each other.

The RJD immediately accused Shah of planning to carve a UT from Seemanchal and West Bengal. Mamata Banerjee staged a sit-in, warning Delhi was trying to “divide Bengal.” Pappu Yadav piled on. The Home Ministry denied everything. And the UT debate consumed all the oxygen, which may have been the point — because the actual instrument Delhi appears to be assembling doesn’t require Parliament’s permission at all.

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Look at what’s already on the table. In West Bengal, the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision deleted 58 lakh voter names and placed 60 lakh more under adjudication — highest concentrations in Murshidabad and Malda, the corridor districts. In Jharkhand, the Centre filed an affidavit before the High Court documenting that the tribal share of Santhal Pargana’s population fell from 44.67 per cent in 1951 to 28.11 per cent by 2011, while the Muslim share surged from single digits to an estimated 22–24 per cent. The affidavit used the word “infiltration.” In Seemanchal, Kishanganj sits at 68 per cent Muslim — against Bihar’s state average of 17 per cent.

Thirteen contiguous districts across three states, two international borders, and one chokepoint. The demographic data is now on court record. The voter rolls are being cleaned. And the two men installed on either side of the corridor have spent their careers in exactly this kind of terrain.

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Here’s the thing: a Union Territory carved from three states is legally simple but politically impossible. Article 3 requires consulting three legislatures — two of which are opposition-governed. Mamata would weaponise it as victimhood for a decade. Hemant Soren defeated the BJP’s infiltration argument in Jharkhand’s 2024 elections and has zero incentive to cooperate. The J&K 2019 model needed President’s Rule and no elected government to resist. None of those conditions exist here.

But there’s a precedent for something quieter. In 2023, the Election Commission completed Assam’s delimitation — the first since 1976 — using 2001 Census data instead of the more contested 2011 figures. It redrew all 126 constituencies and recalibrated political representation in ways that Bengali-origin Muslim communities argued had diluted their electoral weight. No parliamentary vote required. Delimitation Commission orders carry the force of law and are nearly unjusticiable.

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Now connect the pieces. The post-2026 Census provisions that froze constituency numbers are about to expire, reopening nationwide delimitation. A delimitation exercise covering Seemanchal, Bengal’s corridor districts, and Santhal Pargana — using the SIR-cleaned voter rolls as baseline — achieves electorally what a UT achieves administratively. It recalibrates representational weight across the entire belt. No majority needed. No victimhood platform for Mamata. No cooperation required from Hemant. It arrives not as a political event but as a technical exercise by a constitutional body: routine democratic maintenance, not territorial surgery.

The political consequences could be identical. The optics would be unrecognisable.

Ravi is the Centre’s sensor inside a state whose government will treat every central intelligence initiative in the corridor as a provocation. Hasnain, with his counter-insurgency background and civilian engagement doctrine, is positioned for the period when the recalibration — if it comes — needs to be managed without producing the very alienation it’s meant to prevent. They aren’t there to announce anything. They’re there to prepare conditions — patiently, institutionally, below the threshold of crisis.

The formal instrument, when it comes, probably won’t be reorganisation. It’ll be delimitation. Same destination. Reached by means that don’t require announcing the journey.

Based on “Why Delhi Placed A Spymaster And A General On Either Side Of The Siliguri Corridor“ by Abhishek Kumar.

India has 125,000 chip designers, and not one of them designs a chip that India owns.

Niti Aayog member V.K. Saraswat said the quiet part out loud last week when he told Mint that Indian designers contribute to virtually every chip produced globally but work primarily for MNCs, mostly on subsystems and components, with very few capable of what he called “ab initio design of a complete system.”

What makes this significant is not the diagnosis — anyone in the industry knows this — but the fact that a senior government figure finally framed India’s celebrated design talent as a structural dependency rather than a national strength.

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Because what Saraswat described is India’s IT services model — labour arbitrage without value creation — replicated inside silicon. Intel employs 14,000 engineers in Bengaluru, AMD has 6,500 across ten locations, and in February 2026 Qualcomm completed a 2nm chip tape-out entirely from its Indian centres, which is a genuine frontier achievement.

But the architecture decisions, the product strategy, and the patent filings all stay at headquarters, which is why Qualcomm filed 3,482 patent applications at the Indian Patent Office in 2022-23 while Cadence India’s own managing director acknowledged publicly that what India is missing is homegrown product companies. India provides the brains; San Diego captures the value.

The pride in “Indians design every chip” is precisely the delusion that prevents the country from asking why no Indian company designs any chip worth naming.

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And yet a handful of startups have quietly proven that end-to-end chip design from Indian soil is an accomplished fact. Signalchip, backed by Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu, built India’s first indigenous 4G/5G modem chips — one of roughly eight companies on Earth with this capability, now deployed in Indian Army base stations.

Mindgrove Technologies shipped a commercial RISC-V microcontroller fabricated at TSMC’s 28nm node. Saankhya Labs developed production software-defined radio chipsets. ISRO’s Vikram 3201 is a flight-tested, fully indigenous space-grade processor. These are real chips with real deployments, and they validate Saraswat’s premise that the talent exists — the question is entirely about what kind of ecosystem surrounds it.

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Which is where his diagnosis collides with budget reality. The Design Linked Incentive scheme, the only government programme directly funding chip design startups, has a total allocation of roughly ₹1,000 crore — barely 1.3% of the semiconductor mission outlay — and supports just 24 companies whose combined VC funding of ₹430 crore is less than what AMD spends in India in a single year.

ISM 2.0’s R&D allocation works out to approximately $120 million, which would not cover the cost of a single advanced SoC programme at Qualcomm or Apple. For perspective, China poured $98 billion across three Big Fund phases and built a $91 billion fabless industry from near-zero in two decades, and Taiwan spent 20 years building a deliberate pipeline from ITRI’s government-funded research to the TSMC spinoff to MediaTek.

We’re saying the scale of this challenge is many times larger than the budget we have for it.

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Saraswat says the mission will recruit MNC designers to build indigenous capability, but the question he didn’t answer is what they’d be recruited to — because Signalchip’s founder survived his first four years on $2 million from family and friends after every VC in the country turned him away, and the DLI scheme’s per-company allocation of roughly $2.4 million is enough for one mask set at a trailing-edge node but nowhere near enough to build a globally competitive product.

There is no government procurement mandate for indigenous chips, no patient capital fund that understands decade-long hardware return horizons, and no DARPA equivalent guaranteeing first customers.

The startups have proven the concept, but until the distance between what gets said at Niti Aayog and what gets funded by the Finance Ministry narrows dramatically, Indian chip sovereignty will remain a conference-stage aspiration rather than an industrial reality.

You did everything right.

You listened to the government campaigns. Applied for subsidies. Watched workers bolt panels to your roof in Thrissur or Ernakulam or Thiruvananthapuram. Solar power. Clean energy. Lower bills. Maybe even some money back when you exported to the grid.

Then Kerala changed the rules.

The state’s 2025 solar regulations now require rooftop solar households to install battery storage systems. No batteries? Your net metering arrangement—the thing that made the economics work—gets worse. A decent home battery costs ₹2-4 lakh. You already spent ₹3-5 lakh on panels. Now they want you to double down.

The stated reason: solar peaks at midday, Kerala’s demand peaks between 6 pm and midnight. State data shows only 36 percent of rooftop solar gets self-consumed during daylight. The rest flows to the grid, and nearly half gets drawn back at night. KSEB says this creates grid management problems.

Fair enough. That’s a real engineering challenge.

But here’s the question nobody in Thiruvananthapuram wants to answer: why is the household responsible for solving it?

Look at where KSEB’s money actually goes.

Power purchases consume 60 percent of the utility’s entire turnover—roughly ₹13,000 crore last year. Kerala generates only 30 percent of what it consumes. The rest gets imported. Hydel projects contribute around 1,800 MW in good years. Peak demand hits 5,800 MW.

The gap gets filled by coal power from Kudgi, Simhadri, Vallur, Ramagundam. Coal shortages force blending with expensive imports. Freight costs spike. Variable costs exceed approved limits. Tariffs rise.

This is the structural crisis. This is where the money haemorrhages.

Rooftop solar? It’s a rounding error in KSEB’s cost structure. The power being exported and drawn back by prosumers is measured in megawatts. KSEB’s losses are measured in thousands of crores.

You’re not the problem. You’re just easier to regulate than the problem.

KSEB had years to prepare.

They could have invested in grid-level storage. They didn’t. Smart grid infrastructure that handles distributed generation. They didn’t. Community inverter systems, neighbourhood-level storage, flexible demand management. They didn’t.

Other states figured this out. Bihar, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Rajasthan have deployed community solar inverter models—aggregating storage locally instead of forcing every household to buy batteries. Utilities partner with prosumers, lease back capacity, create microgrids.

Kerala—dense population, high incomes, strong civic infrastructure—is better positioned for this than any of those states. But that would require KSEB to invest. To treat prosumers as partners rather than problems.

Instead, they wrote regulations making you buy batteries.

This is what privatising public failure looks like.

KSEB can’t fix its import dependence. Can’t control coal prices. Can’t reduce its purchase bill. Can’t modernise a grid built for a world that no longer exists.

But KSEB can regulate households. So that’s what they did.

The 2025 rules don’t solve Kerala’s energy crisis. They just shift the cost of flexibility from the utility that should have built it onto the citizens who actually invested in renewables. The people who went green get taxed for going green.

The message is clear. If you’re considering rooftop solar in Kerala, be prepared to pay twice. Once for the panels. Once for the batteries KSEB should have planned for.

And if you already installed? Congratulations. You’re now subsidising the utility’s failure to modernise—while they keep buying coal power from across the country and blaming you for grid instability.

You did everything right. Kerala made sure it didn’t matter.

Based on original reporting in Swarajya Magazine: Why Is Kerala Punishing Solar Prosumers For Its Obsolete Grid

V. Anantha Nageswaran — the country’s top economist, the man whose job is to actually understand what trade agreements do — has written what amounts to a methodical dismantling of every major objection to the Indo-US interim trade framework.

And the core of his argument is deceptively simple: you’re reading the text literally when it was written directionally. Framework agreements express shared intent and broad orientation. They’re not procurement contracts with penalty clauses.

Take the number that launched a thousand op-eds — India’s stated intention to purchase up to $500 billion worth of American goods over five years. The commentary treated this as a binding commitment, as though India had signed a cheque.

Nageswaran points out that this is a signal of intent to deepen economic engagement, anchored in product categories where the US already has global competitiveness: advanced manufacturing inputs, energy tech, semiconductor equipment, aerospace and defence systems. These aren’t consumer imports displacing Indian producers. They’re productivity-enhancing inputs for domestic value chains — the kind of purchases that support infrastructure expansion and manufacturing upgradation.

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Now the agriculture panic.

The interim framework doesn’t touch market access for US soyabeans, maize, dairy, or poultry — the products that would actually threaten Indian farming. What it covers are products like DDGS, feed sorghum, tree nuts, processed fruits, soyabean oil, wines and spirits.

As Nageswaran notes, citing Harish Damodaran’s analysis, these are either not produced at scale in India or constitute a marginal share of agricultural output. Cereals, pulses, sugarcane, milk — the crops that define Indian agriculture — remain unaffected. The impact, if any, is limited to relative price adjustments in specific input markets, not displacement of core farm production.

Then there’s the zero-duty objection — the argument that India gave away industrial tariff access while the US still taxes Indian exports. Nageswaran’s rebuttal here is sharp. The economic significance of tariffs depends not on their absolute level but on their incidence relative to competing exporting countries.

Assessed on this basis, India’s relative market access position has actually improved. And zero-duty access doesn’t obligate anyone to import anything — tariff liberalisation influences prices, not purchase decisions. When US products are cost-competitive, lower tariffs reduce input costs for Indian producers and prices for consumers. When they’re not competitive, trade flows won’t change materially.

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Here’s where the piece gets genuinely interesting — the part most commentators skipped past.

Nageswaran argues that where the agreement truly matters is in confidence and capital flows. By restoring predictability in trade relations with the US, India has put itself back in contention for global portfolio and direct investment at a moment when it desperately needed both. Without such inflows, financing even a modest external deficit had come under strain, and the rupee would have continued to face downside risks through 2026.

Think about it: the US remains, by a wide margin, the world’s largest source of final demand. US private consumption alone hit nearly $20 trillion in 2024 — exceeding the combined consumption of the next three largest economies. Competitive and predictable access to this market isn’t a nice-to-have for India’s export ambitions. Nageswaran calls it foundational — for manufacturing scale, currency stability, and the sustainability of external balances.

He’s also thinking about the factory floor. Labour-intensive sectors like textiles, gems and jewellery, shrimp, and auto components stand to benefit directly. For an economy where job creation remains the central challenge, this isn’t a secondary consideration.

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And then there’s Pax Silica — the detail buried near the end that deserves its own headline.

The US has invited India to join a strategic initiative to secure and reconfigure global silicon, semiconductor, and critical minerals supply chains. Nageswaran reads this as confirmation that trade predictability is being treated as a gateway to deeper industrial, technological, and supply-chain integration. You don’t get that invitation by being an unreliable partner. You get it by demonstrating that you’re open for business on terms the world’s largest economy can work with.

The CEA’s concluding line is worth sitting with: the agreement matters less for what it concedes than for what it enables — investment, scale, and a durable place for India within the economic architecture now taking shape.

The real risk, he writes, lies not in engagement but in the continued mischaracterisation of such engagement as weakness. The critics wanted a ledger of concessions. India’s chief economic adviser handed them a map.

Based on “The meaning and significance of the Indo-US trade agreement for India” by V. Anantha Nageswaran | Mint

₹45 crore disappeared from one temple in twelve months. Nobody was fired. Nobody was arrested. Instead, the people who spent it got to keep their jobs.

That’s the short version of what happened at Azhagar Kovil, one of Tamil Nadu’s most sacred temples, nestled on the hills north of Madurai. The longer version involves illegal administrators, missing trustees, phantom budgets, and a governance vacuum so complete that the Madras High Court called it “a crime against the deity.”

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Here’s how the numbers break down. In March 2021, Azhagar Kovil’s surplus stood at ₹96.6 crore—funds accumulated over decades from devotee donations, meant for religious and charitable purposes. By March 2023, it had grown to ₹107.6 crore. By March 2024, it had crashed to ₹62.37 crore.

That’s ₹45 crore spent in a single year. The kicker? None of it was budgeted. The HR&CE Act requires temple budgets to be prepared by trustees, scrutinised by authorities, and formally approved before money is spent. At Azhagar Kovil, the massive expenditure under the government’s “Iconic Temple Development Scheme” didn’t appear in any budget document. Crores were sanctioned and spent as if the statutory process simply didn’t exist.

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Now here’s where the system failure becomes deliberate. For thirteen years—from 2010 to 2023—Azhagar Kovil had no Board of Trustees. Under the HR&CE Act, major temples with substantial income must have trustees who function as custodians of the temple’s religious character, finances, and property. Instead, Azhagar Kovil was run by a “Fit Person,” a temporary administrator whose appointment the court found to be illegal in the first place.

The Fit Person arrangement is only valid for temples with hereditary trustees. Azhagar Kovil has had non-hereditary trustees since 1801. The person running the temple for over a decade had no legal authority to do so. And it was during his tenure that a “master plan” was drawn up—the same plan the government used to justify ₹40 crore worth of constructions including VIP guest houses, restaurants, commercial shops, and a sewage treatment plant within the sacred precincts.

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The court wasn’t buying it. When judges asked for trustee resolutions showing that projects had been deliberated, their necessity assessed, and their legality examined, no meaningful documentation was produced. “There is no material to show that the trustees applied their mind to the necessity or legality of the expenditure,” the bench observed. Even after a Board was finally constituted in 2023, approvals appeared to simply rubber-stamp decisions already taken by HR&CE officials.

And the audit safeguards that should have caught all this? They don’t exist. The HR&CE Department is legally mandated to have its own audit wing. It doesn’t have one. Audits were vaguely handled by another department, and when the court asked for audited accounts, what the temple produced were compilations of income tax statements and balance sheets—none bearing an auditor’s seal or signature.

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The Azhagar Kovil verdict is important because the patterns aren’t unique. Bureaucratic capture of temple administration, “development” projects imposed from above, depletion of accumulated surpluses, sidelining of trustees, bypassing of statutory procedures—this is how the HR&CE system operates across Tamil Nadu.

The court has now reasserted that accumulated surpluses are protected reserves, not government money to spend on commercial-style expansion. It has reaffirmed that Executive Officers are meant to be temporary crisis administrators, not permanent rulers. Whether Tamil Nadu implements the spirit of this ruling or confines it to one temple remains to be seen. But the playbook has been exposed. And the precedent now exists for every devotee, trustee, and court to invoke.

Based on S. Rajesh’s original reporting in Swarajya

Journalists think layoffs can’t touch them. Then 500 people at WaPo learned otherwise.

When The Washington Post announced it was sacking a third of its staff on February 5th, closing entire sections and gutting international coverage, the industry’s reaction was revealing. Not sadness at job losses - that’s human. But outrage at the very idea that market forces apply to journalism. The Guardian called it a “bloodbath.” The Atlantic went further: “The Murder of The Washington Post.”

Here’s what they’re not saying: American trust in newspapers dropped from 40% five years ago to 28% today. That’s hardly murder. It is simply customers walking away.

“We too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience.”

The numbers are brutal, and they’ve been available the whole time. A Gallup poll from October showed trust in newspapers, TV and radio at its lowest point ever - 28%, down from 31% the year before. A Pew report confirmed the same trend. This is not new information. In fact, journalists had years to see this coming.

But instead of introspection, the industry chose defensiveness. Critics were labeled “trolls.” Declining trust was blamed on social media, misinformation, anyone but the journalists themselves. Even WaPo’s own executive editor only acknowledged the problem while announcing the layoffs: “We too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience.”

That confession came about 15 years too late.

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Think about what journalism demands from everyone else. Accountability. Transparency. Admission of error. Politicians must explain their failures. CEOs must answer for their mistakes. Every industry gets scrutinized, fact-checked, held to account.

Except journalism itself.

Which business journal warned you about Enron’s financial fraud before it collapsed? How many media outlets questioned the Bush administration’s WMD claims before the Iraq invasion? Who in the mainstream press took The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story seriously in 2020, before the election? The answer: almost none. The New York Times actively cast doubt on the laptop story to help Joe Biden’s campaign.

The pattern is clear. Journalists cover everyone’s failures brilliantly - except their own. They investigate corruption everywhere - except in their own biases. They demand humility from the powerful while operating with supreme confidence that their own perspective is somehow neutral, objective, the unvarnished truth.

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Here’s the thing about bias: everyone has it. If you’re a woman, you might be more critical of men. If you’re forward caste, you might miss the struggles of those left behind. If you’re Hindu or Muslim, you’ll naturally lean toward one community’s concerns. Don’t miss it for moral failing. It’s just being human.

The journalism industry’s fatal flaw is pretending this doesn’t apply to them. They positioned themselves as seekers of “whole truth” while clearly favoring particular political and social perspectives. In India, some outlets obsessed over six church incidents in Delhi and framed it as an attack on Christians nationwide - ignoring that temples and gurudwaras faced similar or worse attacks. How is that neutrality? It is narrative-building masquerading as reporting.

WaPo and The New York Times have both spent years crafting negative narratives about India and its majority community. Media academic Ramesh Rao has documented the NYT’s anti-Hindu bias repeatedly. This isn’t about victimhood - it’s about acknowledging that journalism is never without slant, because humans write it.

The hubris lies in the denial. In claiming objectivity while clearly operating from specific worldviews. In having editorial boards that collectively endorse presidential candidates and then acting shocked when readers question their impartiality.

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Social media didn’t kill journalism’s credibility. It just made the bias visible. For decades, journalists controlled the narrative because they controlled distribution. If you wanted news, you needed them. They were the middlemen between events and audiences, and that position gave them enormous power.

Then the internet arrived. Suddenly anyone with a phone camera could report. Anyone could publish. Anyone could build an audience. The gatekeeping function that defined journalism for centuries became optional.

Journalists watched their monopoly crumble and called it a conspiracy. They saw trust numbers collapse and blamed everyone except themselves. They lost subscribers and declared it an attack on democracy rather than a market response to declining quality.

When Jeff Bezos told WaPo’s editorial board they couldn’t endorse a presidential candidate in 2024 but could write their opinions under their own names, mass cancellations followed. The board wanted to endorse Kamala Harris. Bezos said no. The underlying assumption was clear: journalists believed their collective opinion carried more weight than anyone else’s.

That’s the privilege delusion. The belief that journalism is a higher calling, somehow nobler than other professions. More important than market forces. Deserving of special protection from economic reality.

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The WaPo “bloodbath” is what happens when an industry mistakes its self-image for reality. When it spends years demanding accountability from everyone else while refusing to acknowledge its own failures. When it operates with such confidence in its own righteousness that it can’t see the customers leaving.

Journalism isn’t a higher calling. It’s a job. Like commercial sex work, like selling insurance, like coding software. Each serves a function. Each operates in a market. Each needs to deliver value to survive.

The difference? Sex workers are at least honest about the transaction. With journalism, you’re never quite sure what’s being sold and whether truth is actually on offer. Now everybody knows that. The trust numbers prove it.

Five hundred people lost their jobs at WaPo this week. That’s genuinely sad. But the real tragedy started years ago when journalists decided they were too important to admit mistakes, too principled to acknowledge bias, too noble to learn humility.

The market just sent them the bill.

Based on R Jagannathan’s piece in Swarajya Magazine: A Crisis Of Humility: Why WaPo ‘Bloodbath’ Must Compel Journalists To Look Within

The central government just achieved something rare. Expenditure below 14 per cent of GDP.

Here’s why it doesn’t matter: state governments are borrowing another Rs 13-14 lakh crore annually. Thirteen states have fiscal deficits exceeding 3.5 per cent, above the mandated 3 per cent limit. Combined central and state debt now stands at 85 per cent of GDP. The centre cuts half a percentage point. The states add three. Total debt-to-GDP keeps climbing.

Professor Prasanna Tantri of the Indian School of Business lays out the arithmetic that should worry you. Budget 2026 represents genuine structural transformation at the central level, with government expenditure now among the lowest in the world as a share of GDP. “This allows so much space for the private sector,” he notes. “Government can do lot more by its absence than its presence.” The FM delivered on her five-year-old promise to reduce fiscal deficit to 4.5 per cent, something even developed countries rarely achieve.

And none of it will survive the states.

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The numbers tell the real story. Total savings in the Indian economy run around Rs 90-95 lakh crore annually. Government borrowing absorbs Rs 30 lakh crore of that. With no significant FDI coming in and another Rs 10 lakh crore needed for depreciation and maintenance, where exactly does private investment capital come from?

Central government interest expense is already Rs 14 lakh crore, about 3.5 per cent of GDP, on total revenue of Rs 34 lakh crore. For comparison, the United States, with 120 per cent debt-to-GDP, pays only 3 per cent in interest. India’s interest burden as a proportion is higher than America’s despite having lower absolute debt. The cost of servicing past borrowing is eating into future capacity.

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The freebie cycle is now universal. Prof Tantri traces it back to the 2008 debt waiver that consumed 2 per cent of GDP. PM-KISAN started it at the central level in 2018, Karnataka followed in a big way, then Telangana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Bengal. Now every state wants to give cash to women. This is not a partisan problem. BJP-ruled states are doing it too. Eighteen to twenty states are ruled by the same party that controls the centre, yet state-level profligacy continues unabated.

“My definition of freebie is if it is not solving a market failure, then it’s a freebie,” Prof Tantri clarifies. PM SVANidhi, which gave small loans to street vendors who had no credit access, solved a genuine market failure. Randomly transferring Rs 2,000-3,000 for no reason does not.

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The real danger is if the Reserve Bank tries to cushion rising interest rates by printing money. RBI has already printed Rs 6.5 lakh crore of reserve money in the last six months, otherwise market rates would have risen further. The 10-year government bond yield is at 6.77 per cent, up 50 basis points despite RBI rate cuts. The 30-year bond yields 7.4 per cent.

“Printing money is not the answer,” Prof Tantri argues. “RBI should let the interest rates go up. Let these policymakers suffer. Otherwise we will suffer for long term.” When the government’s own projections expect 4 per cent inflation and the repo rate is 5.25 per cent, real rates are only 1.25 per cent, historically low. There is no scope for cutting further. If state borrowing continues, RBI should raise rates, not cut them.

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Asked to describe the budget in one word, Prof Tantri struggles, because the assessment depends entirely on which level of government you examine. “From the central government expenditure point of view, it’s transformative. But bring state, everything is nullified.”

Finance Minister Sitharaman chose substance over showmanship. She could have made ten fancy announcements and implemented none, and commentators would have been happier. Instead, she delivered genuine fiscal discipline. Whether that discipline survives the states remains the central question of Indian economic policy. Right now, it is swimming against a tide.

This article is based on Professor Prasanna Tantri’s conversation on Swarajya’s “What This Means” podcast. Listen to the full podcast on Spotify.

Full Episode Here

In 1933, Keynes wrote an essay that liberal economists still hate. India just budgeted ₹12 lakh crore on it.

The essay was called National Self-Sufficiency. The argument was simple: when global trade becomes unreliable, countries should bring production home—even if it costs more. Keynes wasn’t becoming a protectionist. He was being pragmatic. If supply chains can be weaponized, the math changes. Resilience becomes worth paying for.

Budget 2026-27 runs that exact playbook. The Finance Minister explicitly warned that “trade and multilateralism are imperilled” and supply chains are “routinely politicised.” The operational response is Keynesian in the 1933 sense: selective self-reliance as insurance against a hostile world. The word “self-sufficiency” appears nowhere. The policy is everywhere.

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Here’s what that policy looks like in practice: ₹10,000 crore for biopharma over five years, three new pharmaceutical research institutes, 1,000 clinical trial sites. Electronics component manufacturing gets bumped from ₹22,919 crore to ₹40,000 crore after investment commitments reportedly doubled. A ₹10,000 crore SME Growth Fund. Seven “strategic and frontier” sectors get dedicated ecosystem funding.

This is industrial policy with a specific bet embedded in it. The bet is that global instability isn’t a phase—it’s the new normal. If that’s true, every rupee spent building domestic capacity pays off in avoided disruption. But if global trade stabilizes, if supply chains become reliable again, India has just paid an enormous premium for insurance it didn’t need.

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The budget’s own language reveals the tension. It insists India must “increase exports and attract stable, long-term investment” while simultaneously building buffers against a world that can’t be trusted. Don’t confuse it for a contradiction. It’s a hedge. But hedges have costs, and those costs compound.

Consider the logic chain. Capital expenditure rises to ₹12.2 lakh crore. Fiscal deficit stays at 4.3 per cent of GDP. Debt sits at 55.6 per cent. In a tight-fiscal-space world, every rupee directed toward self-sufficiency is a rupee not spent somewhere else. The budget frames this as “risk design” rather than subsidy. But risk design still has a price tag. Someone pays.

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Keynes understood this trade-off. His essay explicitly acknowledged that self-sufficiency is “expensive insurance.” The value depends entirely on how dangerous the world actually is. If the global system is genuinely fragmenting—tariffs rising, supply chains politicized, multilateral institutions hollowing out—then India’s bet is shrewd. The premium buys real protection.

But here’s the uncomfortable question the budget doesn’t answer: what’s the exit strategy? Industrial policy works when governments can stop backing bets that aren’t paying off. India’s track record on sunset clauses and milestone-based accountability is not encouraging. The budget promises “disciplined intervention.” Discipline is the hard part.

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India can launch schemes. That is not the real test. It’s whether India can kill them. Biopharma SHAKTI, the electronics push, the SME fund—all of these require something India has historically struggled with: the willingness to withdraw support from politically connected firms that miss targets.

Every successful industrializer intervened. But every successful industrializer also learned to say no. Budget 2026 has made its bet on a broken world. The question now is whether India has the institutional spine to enforce the bargain: if the state subsidizes frontier risk, firms must accept frontier accountability. That’s the expensive part of the insurance policy nobody’s discussing.

This article is based on analysis originally published in Swarajya.

“The Indian private sector, historically risk-averse and comfortable with technology licensing or import, has failed to step up as the primary engine of R&D.”

That’s the Economic Survey 2025-26 — not an opposition critique or an academic paper, but the government’s own annual assessment of the economy.

And the diagnosis goes beyond money. The problem, the Survey argues, is fundamentally cultural: Indian business has not developed the institutional habit of investing in research, because boards have not demanded it, investors have not rewarded it, and the path of least resistance has always been technology import.

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The numbers frame the problem more clearly. Business sector R&D accounts for just 41 per cent of India’s total research expenditure, compared to 77 per cent in China, 75 per cent in the United States, and 79 per cent in South Korea. India’s total R&D spending sits at 0.64 per cent of GDP, against the US at 3.48 per cent, China at 2.43 per cent, and South Korea at 4.91 per cent.

But the aggregate underinvestment is less revealing than its composition. In innovation-leading economies, private firms account for three-quarters or more of R&D spending, because they’re betting on future products, future markets, and future competitive advantage. They accept short-term costs for long-term positioning. Indian corporate India, the Survey implies, has not made that bet at scale — and the reasons have more to do with incentive structures than with capital availability.

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The Survey identifies a specific behavioural pattern that explains this gap: Indian firms have consistently preferred technology licensing and import over indigenous development. For decades, this made perfect commercial sense.

When global supply chains were open and technology was freely transferable, there was little reason to bear the costs and risks of domestic R&D. Why spend years developing a process when you could license it from abroad? Why invest in uncertain research when you could import proven equipment? The returns to technology adoption were immediate and predictable, while the returns to technology creation were distant and uncertain.

Indian business optimised rationally for the environment it faced, and the strategy delivered reliable profits for a generation. The problem is that the environment has now changed in ways that make the old playbook dangerous. Global supply chains are fragmenting along geopolitical lines, technology access is increasingly weaponised, and export controls, investment screening, and strategic decoupling have made technology transfer far less reliable than it once was.

“The global technology landscape is bifurcating,” the Survey warns, “and India cannot afford to be a client state.”

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The consequences of this underinvestment show up in what the Survey calls the “translation” problem. “India excels at Technology Readiness Level 1-3,” it observes, “but an industrial economy needs TRL 7-9 products.”

India produces world-class science at the early stages of research — it now ranks third globally in scholarly output, behind only China and the United States. But the intermediate stages of innovation — prototyping, piloting, validation, and scale-up — require private capital willing to accept the risks of applied research, and when that capital is absent, promising discoveries languish in laboratories.

The valley of death between academic research and commercial markets claims innovations that might otherwise have become products, exports, and jobs.

The startup ecosystem has begun filling part of this gap, with recognised startups growing from around 500 in 2016 to over 2 lakh in 2025. But startups cannot substitute for sustained corporate R&D, because the deep technologies that define industrial competitiveness — advanced materials, precision manufacturing, pharmaceutical discovery — demand the deep pockets, long time horizons, and institutional capabilities that only established firms possess.

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The government has responded with supply-side interventions designed to shift corporate incentives. The ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund announced in Budget 2025-26 explicitly targets the translation stage where private investment is most needed, while the Anusandhan National Research Foundation provides institutional architecture for aligning research priorities with industrial needs.

But as the Survey implicitly acknowledges, these measures can make R&D investment easier and less risky — they cannot compel it. The decision to invest sits with corporate boards, and that decision is shaped by how investors value research-intensive firms, how compensation committees structure executive incentives, and whether corporate India believes it can compete through innovation rather than through cost arbitrage and market access.

The Survey articulates the stakes with unusual directness. India can work toward “defensive sovereignty and offensive leverage” by becoming indispensable in high-tech domains, or it can remain “a service provider to the developed world, vulnerable to technology denial regimes and supply chain shocks.”

“A firm choice shall have to be made,” the document concludes — but the choice isn’t the government’s to make. It belongs to the boards, investors, and executives who allocate corporate India’s capital, and who must decide whether Indian business sees itself as a technology taker or a technology maker, an adapter or an innovator, a follower or a leader. Policy can nudge, but it cannot decide.

This article is based on “Risk-Averse And Comfortable: What Economic Survey Says About Corporate India’s Innovation Problem“ published in Swarajya.

The Education Ministry wrote a balanced draft UGC equity rules in February 2025. By January 2026, that policy was unrecognisable.

What happened in between tells you everything about how policy gets captured in India—not through backroom deals, but through courtroom theatre, strategic pressure, and bureaucratic surrender. The UGC Equity Regulations 2026, now sparking nationwide protests, didn’t have to be this way. The ministry’s own draft proved it.

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Here’s the backstory.

In 2019, the mothers of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi—students who died by suicide after alleged caste discrimination—filed a PIL demanding enforcement of existing anti-discrimination rules. The petition, represented by Senior Advocate Indira Jaising, didn’t ask for radical new regulations. It wanted a 2012 framework actually implemented: functional Equal Opportunity Cells, real monitoring, integration with accreditation bodies.

The Supreme Court issued notices. Then nothing happened for years. The PIL sat dormant until January 2025, when Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan finally demanded action. The UGC responded with a draft in February 2025.

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That draft was surprisingly sensible. It retained focus on caste discrimination against SC/ST students—directly addressing the PIL’s concerns—while preserving due process for everyone. Complaints would be investigated with both sides presenting evidence. No automatic suspensions or expulsions on mere allegations. Equity Committees would include broad stakeholder representation, not just reserved categories.

Most importantly, the draft included penalties for false complaints. Anyone filing a demonstrably malicious claim could face fines. This wasn’t about discouraging genuine victims—it was about preventing weaponisation of the grievance system. Academic environments are rife with rivalries, competition, and factional politics. Without safeguards against abuse, any complaint mechanism becomes a tool for settling scores.

The draft received 391 public suggestions. Many observers acknowledged it could become a model policy with minor refinements.

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Then came September 15, 2025.

In that Supreme Court hearing, Jaising pressed for ten specific reforms: grievance committees with substantial marginalised representation, grant withdrawal powers for non-compliance, explicit anti-segregation clauses, and more. The bench set an eight-week deadline, warning it would examine any major omissions.

The ministry had a choice. It could defend its balanced draft, explain the safeguards, and negotiate reasonable middle ground. Instead, it capitulated entirely.

When the final regulations dropped on January 13, 2026, every single one of Jaising’s demands was incorporated. The false complaint safeguard? Deleted. Committee composition? Now mandates SC/ST/OBC/PwD/women representation with no equivalent voice for general category members. The definition of “caste-based discrimination”? Narrowed to acts against SC/ST/OBC only—meaning general category students have no equivalent protection.

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The result is a framework that creates two classes of students under the same roof. One group can file discrimination complaints. The other cannot. One group has institutional machinery built for their protection. The other faces that machinery with no reciprocal safeguards.

Dharmendra Pradhan now assures the public that “no one will be harassed.” But assurances don’t override gazette notifications. The regulations are clear in their asymmetry—and the ministry’s own February 2025 draft proves they knew how to write fair policy.

They chose not to.

What began as necessary reform has become a cautionary tale of bureaucratic surrender. The ministry not only lost the plot it also handed the pen to someone else.

This article is based on Swarajya’s reporting: How Education Ministry Lost The Plot On UGC Equity Regulations

At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw found himself in a position familiar to any Indian representative at global forums: being talked down to.

When IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva casually placed India in a “second tier” of AI nations—behind America and China, lumped with capable but lesser powers—Vaishnaw pushed back with vigour.

“India is clearly in the first group,” he insisted, citing the Stanford AI Index: third globally in AI vibrancy, second in talent concentration. The country, he argued, was already “the largest supplier of AI services” and building systematically across five foundational layers: applications, models, chips, infrastructure, and energy.

Vaishnaw was doing his job, and doing it well. It would have been absurd for India’s Minister of Electronics and IT to sit on a Davos stage and enumerate his country’s capability gaps for an international audience.

At global forums, you project strength, claim your place at the table, and let the rankings speak. His citations were accurate; his framing was strategic; his confidence was appropriate. When the IMF Managing Director casually diminishes your country’s standing, you push back. This is what ministers do, and Vaishnaw did it effectively.

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But what serves India well at Davos does not serve Indians well at home. The risk is that ministerial confidence curdles into national complacency—that we mistake projecting strength for possessing it, that we confuse a good performance with a won race.

Vaishnaw’s five-layer framework is genuinely useful for understanding India’s AI position. Examining each layer honestly, however, reveals a more complex picture than triumphalism allows.

The ₹10,372 crore ($1.25 billion) IndiaAI Mission represents serious intent; it also represents roughly what OpenAI or Anthropic burns through in six months.

Understanding where India actually stands—and what must be built—requires examining each layer against global benchmarks, with the honesty that Davos does not permit but domestic strategy demands.

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Layer 1: Applications — India’s Genuine Strength, Within Limits

India’s claim to AI applications leadership deserves serious examination… (continue reading on Swarajya)

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