The India-US Trade Deal: A Framework of Asymmetries
What the headlines celebrate as Modi's diplomatic win, the fine print reveals as a deal where India gives more than it gets
Varna
All things evidence-based!
The Modi Epstein Files: When Private Wealth Intermediates State Policy
When a convicted sex offender becomes the backchannel for India's diplomatic strategy, it reveals more than scandal. On how the Ambani-Epstein conversation exposes elite information networks bypassing formal institutions, creating market advantages through advance policy knowledge, and exemplifying the systematic erosion of state capacity in Modi's India.
Varna
The Orange Economy Delusion: Training Workers for Other Nations' Creative Empires
Budget 2026-27 allocated Rs 250 crore for "Orange Economy" labs to train 2 million AVGC workers by 2030. South Korea invests $1.1 billion annually in content production and IP development, building companies like CJ Entertainment that own global franchises. India's approach trains animators to execute Hollywood's visions while Adani-Ambani extract public wealth through airports and telecom, not creative industries. The orange branding masks saffron reality: metrics without investment, training without capacity.
Varna
Skill India or Scam India: How ₹14,450 Crore Vanished Into Ghost Trainees and Paper Centers
The CAG has documented systematic fraud in the Modi government's flagship skilling program. But the real scandal is what it reveals about India's squandered demographic dividend.
Varna
Budget 2026-27: The Numbers Behind the Noise
Inside the Demands for Grants, the off-budget funds, and the Rs 95,125 crore that Parliament did not vote on.
Varna
Imperial Economics Returns: The Rules-Based Order Dies in Caracas, Copenhagen, and Havana
Trump captures Maduro, threatens to annex Greenland, and strangles Cuba with secondary sanctions. The system that took 47 years to build is being dismantled in weeks.
Varna
India's AI Deficit: The World's Largest Engineering Pipeline Produces Workers, Not Innovators
Why the US invested 94 times more in AI than India last year, why 62% of India's top engineering talent emigrates, why every semiconductor fab proposal keeps collapsing, and what this means for an IT sector already shedding tens of thousands of jobs to the very technology India cannot build.
Varna
The UGC Equity Rules: How Student Suicides Became a BJP Political Crisis
Regulations meant to prevent student suicides triggered Supreme Court intervention, BJP resignations, and exposed how India destroys thousands of crores in human capital annually through institutional discrimination while allocating minimal resources to equity enforcement.
Varna
The Rs 41,700 Crore Question: When Budget Allocations Have No Names
Three days before the Union Budget 2025-26, while analysing the Economic Survey's critiques of state "fiscal populism," I kept returning to a single line in last year's budget documents. The Department of Economic Affairs had allocated Rs 62,593 crore to something called "New Schemes" - with no details available. By the revised estimates, only Rs 9,068 crore had been spent. That is Rs 53,525 crore that simply disappeared between announcement and implementation, with no parliamentary questions asked, no CAG audit conducted, and no public explanation of what these "schemes" actually were.
Varna
Our Money, Our Accounts: How India's Transparency Revolution Is Being Strangled in Three Acts
The Economic Survey 2026 proposes ministerial vetoes over RTI. This is the third phase of dismantling the law that exposed lakhs of crores in corruption and made welfare delivery accountable to citizens.
Varna
When the State Admits It's Coming for You: Himanta Biswa Sarma and the Weaponisation of Voter Rolls
On 27 January 2026, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma stood before reporters and said something that should have stopped the nation. "Himanta Biswa Sarma and the BJP are directly against Miyas," he declared, using the derogatory term for Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam. "We are saying it openly; we are not hiding it. We are ensuring that they cannot vote in Assam."
Varna
The Tale of Two Economies: Reading the Economic Survey Against Ground Reality
What the government's annual report card omits, obscures, and attempts to spin and why it matters three days before the Union Budget.
Varna
When the IMF Speaks in Rupees: The Economic Case Against India's Poisoned Air
Why Gita Gopinath's framing of air pollution as an economic crisis could finally force policymakers to act
Varna
Budgets: The Arithmetic of Fiscal Centralisation
How cesses that never reach states, chronic underspending on welfare, and interest payments eating a quarter of expenditure reveal what India's budget actually does
Varna
The Fine Print of the 'Mother of All Deals': What India Conceded in the EU-India FTA
Behind the headlines, the agreement contains no CBAM exemption, potential threats to generic pharmaceuticals, and automobile tariff cuts that reshape domestic manufacturing
Varna
What Maketh a Republic? India at 77
On tanks, tableaux, constitutional promises, invisible workers, and the distance between sovereignty and citizenship
Varna
Grounding Truths
Where India's policies meet India's people. Comics about migration, welfare, work, and the distance between announcement and implementation.
Varna
Stock and Flow: Why India's Welfare State Cannot Touch Wealth
India's top 1% now holds more wealth than during the British Raj. The government's response—Jan Dhan accounts, PM-KISAN transfers, DBT efficiency—smooths consumption flows while leaving the stock of wealth untouched. Meanwhile, Scotland is attempting something India refuses to consider: legislating wealth redistribution. This essay examines why.
Varna
The Cleanest City That Killed Its Residents: Dashboard Governance and the Bodies Beneath
Indore won "India's cleanest city" eight consecutive times while its pipes rotted underground. The gap between dashboard governance and ground reality is now measured in bodies.
Varna
The Education They're Building: VBSA Bill and the Manufactured Crisis in Indian Learning
On how a decade of academic persecution, public university destruction, and systematic defunding has set the stage for legislation that will complete the transformation of education from a public good to private extraction—while raising a generation unprepared for citizenship.
Varna