Varna

All things evidence-based!

India Has Never Measured Its Own Inequality. That Is Not an Accident.
The country that invented systematic household surveys in the 1950s has never conducted a national income distribution survey. The consumption data that substitutes for one produces a Gini coefficient of 25.5 — low enough for the government to claim India is the fourth most equal country in the world. The World Inequality Lab estimates the actual income Gini at above 0.60. The gap between those two numbers is not a measurement error. It is a political architecture.
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The Budget That Parliament Voted On Has Already Expired
India's fiscal arithmetic changed 26 days after Parliament received it. That is not an accident of scheduling. It is a governance problem.
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Define and Rule: What Zohran Mamdani's Capitulations Reveal About the Price of Power
Zohran Mamdani is the most pro-Palestine mayor in American municipal history. He is also systematically undermining his own position every time he is personally pressured. The pattern is consistent: bold declarations on the macro questions (genocide, apartheid, BDS, the IHRA definition) paired with reflexive capitulation on the micro tests (a Palestinian writer's rhetoric, an aide's old social media posts, a reporter's question about his wife). This essay argues that the pattern is not a personal failing but a structural one, and that Mahmood Mamdani, the mayor's father and one of the foremost political theorists of the postcolonial world, has spent fifty years producing scholarship that explains exactly how it works.
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The Price of Someone Else's War: What the US-Israeli Bombing of Iran Costs India and the World
The joint US-Israeli war on Iran, now nineteen days old, has produced what the IEA calls the largest oil supply disruption in history, sent Brent crude above $108, shut the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, displaced 3.2 million Iranians, and triggered an LPG crisis across India. This essay argues that the war follows a seventy-three-year pattern of Western powers destroying sovereign states in the name of freedom while externalising the costs onto the world's poorest people. India, which imports 88% of its crude oil and has 9.8 million citizens in the Gulf, is not a spectator to this war. It is paying for it.
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The Last Dam Has Broken: BJP's Rajya Sabha Majority and the Legislative Flood That Follows
The BJP-led NDA crossed the Rajya Sabha majority mark on March 16, 2026, sweeping 9 of 11 contested seats through cross-voting and the collapse of the opposition. Three days earlier, the government introduced a Transgender Persons Amendment Bill that strips self-identification rights, imposes medical gatekeeping, and operates retroactively. Together, these events mark the end of India's upper house as a functioning institutional constraint on executive power.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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
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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
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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

Varna

All things evidence-based!

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India Has Never Measured Its Own Inequality. That Is Not an Accident.

Varna

The Budget That Parliament Voted On Has Already Expired

Varna

Define and Rule: What Zohran Mamdani's Capitulations Reveal About the Price of Power

Varna

The Price of Someone Else's War: What the US-Israeli Bombing of Iran Costs India and the World

Varna

The Last Dam Has Broken: BJP's Rajya Sabha Majority and the Legislative Flood That Follows

Varna

The India-US Trade Deal: A Framework of Asymmetries

Varna

The Modi Epstein Files: When Private Wealth Intermediates State Policy

Varna

The Orange Economy Delusion: Training Workers for Other Nations' Creative Empires

Varna

Skill India or Scam India: How ₹14,450 Crore Vanished Into Ghost Trainees and Paper Centers

Varna

Budget 2026-27: The Numbers Behind the Noise

Varna

Imperial Economics Returns: The Rules-Based Order Dies in Caracas, Copenhagen, and Havana

Varna

India's AI Deficit: The World's Largest Engineering Pipeline Produces Workers, Not Innovators

Varna

The UGC Equity Rules: How Student Suicides Became a BJP Political Crisis

Varna

The Rs 41,700 Crore Question: When Budget Allocations Have No Names

Varna

Our Money, Our Accounts: How India's Transparency Revolution Is Being Strangled in Three Acts

Varna

When the State Admits It's Coming for You: Himanta Biswa Sarma and the Weaponisation of Voter Rolls

Varna

The Tale of Two Economies: Reading the Economic Survey Against Ground Reality

Varna

When the IMF Speaks in Rupees: The Economic Case Against India's Poisoned Air

Varna

Budgets: The Arithmetic of Fiscal Centralisation

Varna

The Fine Print of the 'Mother of All Deals': What India Conceded in the EU-India FTA

Varna