Grounding Truths
Where India's policies meet India's people. Comics about migration, welfare, work, and the distance between announcement and implementation.
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All things evidence-based!
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.
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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.
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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.
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The Silence of the "Vishwaguru": India's Muted Response to Trump's Venezuela Invasion
While Brazil, South Africa, and even France condemned the most brazen violation of sovereignty in decades, India offered "deep concern" and a call for "dialogue"—without once naming the United States.
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The Law That Eats Due Process: How UAPA Became India's Preferred Tool for Preventive Detention
A 3.2% conviction rate, years of pre-trial imprisonment, and a legal architecture designed to deny bail—India's anti-terror law has become the BJP's favoured instrument for silencing dissent.
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The Genocide That Wasn't: How Indian Media Manufactured a Bangladesh Crisis
Police found 1.1% of attacks were communal. Indian media claimed genocide. The gap between these numbers tells the story of a propaganda machine serving the BJP's domestic politics at the expense of actual Bangladeshi Hindus.
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MSME Sector Under Siege: A Decade of BJP's Destruction
How the Modi government's demonetisation, GST, and COVID lockdown didn't just damage small enterprises—they accelerated the greatest wealth transfer in independent India's history.
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The Economist Who Understood: Manmohan Singh, One Year On
On rights-based legislation, tribal betrayals, the nuclear deal, and what statesmanship actually means—versus what we pretend it means.
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The Aravallis Are Dying: How India's Oldest Mountains Became a Definitional Casualty
On measurement politics, murdered enforcement officers, and watching Delhi's last green barrier disappear
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The Cruel Irony of SHANTI: A Reckoning with India's Nuclear Peace
On the day Parliament passed a bill named "peace," I thought of my father—who spent his life fighting for disarmament and died before the full weight of India's nuclear ambitions could crush the communities he sought to protect.
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One Nation, Unequal Returns: How the Centre Learned to Keep the Money
Cesses, surcharges, and a broken GST promise have systematically drained states while burdening the people the reforms were supposed to help.
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The Falling Rupee: Currency, Sovereignty, and the Price of Dependence
A century after Ambedkar argued that the rupee's instability hurt India's peasants more than its merchants, we're still debating who pays when our currency loses value.
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₹96.72: Who Gets the Discount When Crude Falls?
On energy promises, discounted Russian barrels, the food vs. fuel trap, cars being killed by policy, and why the benefits of cheap oil never reach the pump—or the bus ticket.
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In the Name of RAM: How India Just Dismantled Its Rural Safety Net
The VB-G RAM G Bill doesn't reform MGNREGA—it guts it fiscally, institutionally, and morally. "125 days" is the headline. The fine print is a ₹55,000 crore heist.
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The Great Indian Migration Wave: 150 Years of Invisible Citizens
How colonial exploitation, federalism's failures, and the political economy of domicile have kept hundreds of millions of Indians trapped between two states that claim them but serve neither.
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The Development State That Showed Up
On Caravan's RSS Project, the political economy of parallel infrastructure, and why the fight against Hindutva is inseparable from the fight for a working welfare state
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The Gas Chamber We Call Home
On India's air pollution catastrophe: the year-round industrial poisoning we ignore, the farmers we scapegoat, and the billions we lose pretending it's someone else's problem
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The Jobless Recovery Nobody Wants to Explain
Four years after COVID, India's labour market tells a story the headline numbers refuse to tell
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Data Obfuscation as Modi Operandi
It was the middle of April 2021, the second wave of the pandemic had just about begun to rear its ugly head in India. I was looking forward to spending quiet time with my new-born and celebrating a decade of living with and loving my partner. Then everyone got CoVid (by everyone I mean everyone including my then 2 month old) and all hell broke loose. I remember the horror it became, the frantic search for medicines, the desperation for a hospital bed, leaving the city in disgust and then the three months of deaths, deaths and more deaths.
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