Opinion

The economy showing a stronger performance with 7.8 per cent GDP in the first quarter of current fiscal has sparked a fierce debate over what the headline number really says about India’s economic health. The Government attributes the strong performance to reforms, robust activity in...

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak There is no doubt that AI is leading transformation in different spheres of life and society, influencing every sector of the economy, politics, culture, individual life, infrastructure, and industrial growth. The AI-led ICT shapes governance, policy and decision-making debates unlike any...

By Stephen Holmes Few ideas have traveled as far as the Great Replacement, which holds that native populations are being deliberately supplanted by immigrants. Coined in France by the writer Renaud Camus, it has furnished the grammar for the advance of Marine Le Pen’s National...

By Rajdeep Sardesai Last week, Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration turned its attention to eateries run by ISKCON, the highly popular Krishna Consciousness movement. For millions of devotees, ISKCON is far more than just another institution. It is a global religious and spiritual movement with...

Move over Dr and Prof, Karnataka government has just added another professional prefix to the list. On Teachers’ Day, the state government announced that its teachers can use ‘Tr’ before their names giving them a formal professional identity akin to ‘Dr’ for doctors and ‘Prof’...

Few zombie ideas return as persistently as the claim that right-wing governments are good for the economy, whereas progressive administrations mismanage it. Yet this belief reflects a conception of economics that ignores the sustainability of growth and conservatives’ actual record. Indeed, in country after country,...

In the wake of Nepal's devastating floods, which killed at least 1,300 people, Nepalese officials and others were quick to cite climate change as the primary cause. They were not wrong. The Hindu Kush Himalayas are warming roughly three times faster than the global average,...

Melvin Durai Aman named Shivam Mishra recently booked a taxi to take him and his brother from Noida to Lucknow, a drive of more than six hours. Along the way, Mishra noticed that the cab driver looked exhausted and sleepy. He had apparently been driving...

Ajit Ranade The just-concluded BRICS summit in Delhi may not be remembered for a particularly muscular declaration. But that may miss its more important consequence for India. Did BRICS help accelerate the thaw in India-China relations? India’s diplomatic achievement was not that it convened the...

Bhagirathi Jena The evening air was warm on my terrace as my wife showed me an image that felt like a portal to another time. There we were, rendered in the grainy aesthetic of a 1980s film poster. Our hair was voluminous, our clothes carried...