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Aakar Patel I walk out of my house and onto the street and look around. Not much is different from 10 years ago except that there is more traffic. ‘Crores spent, Smart Cities Mission leaves behind more bills, superficial infrastructure’, reads a headline from a...

Syed Ali Murtaza Rizvi’s decision to hang up his boots eight years ahead of time has clearly rattled the Telangana Secretariat, and with good reason. Rizvi is a senior babu with impeccable credentials, heading two sensitive departments — Revenue and GAD (Political), and his calling...

By Yuen Yuen Ang Conflicts, trade wars, inequality, and democratic decay fill today’s headlines. Each crisis appears to be feeding the next, and it can feel as though the world is coming apart. Western leaders and thinkers have embraced a single word to capture this...

By Senem Aydın-Düzgit US President Donald Trump’s ferocious assault on American institutions over the last nine months is a particularly morbid symptom of the global decline of democracy. But Trump has merely capitalized on a process that was well underway before his return to the...

The existence of bogus voters in the electoral rolls prepared by the Election Commission of India (ECI) has always been an issue that causes concern, as it vitiates the polling process - the soul of democracy. Added to this vicious circle is the presence of...

China is going through the motions of yet another purge in the top echelons of power and this time the removal of key leaders – both in the military and political hierarchy – is on an unprecedented scale. For four days, from 20 to 23...

A recent report published in the American daily The Washington Post has once again brought the pervasive issue of crony capitalism and rent-seeking in India into focus. According to the report, Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), at the behest of the government of India,...

By Aakar Patel If all goes well, and your columnist is really hoping that it does go well, the world’s most famous city will soon be won and run by a man with a Gujarati father and a Punjabi mother. Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic...

It’s not every day that a Prime Minister spends hours in brainstorming sessions with senior bureaucrats. But that’s exactly what Narendra Modi has been doing. Recently, he was huddling with his top babus in marathon meetings to “reboot governance” under the Modi 3.0 banner. The...

By Shoumitro Chatterjee & Arvind Subramanian China’s rising trade surplus is once again causing unease in the United States and Europe. But the real casualties from this new “China Shock” will not be in the West. They will be in the developing world, where hundreds...