Varna

All things evidence-based!

The Cockroaches Came Together
A judge's insult became a political party, a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, and a march on Parliament that met lathis and tear gas on the first day of the Monsoon Session. Underneath the satire sits an examination agency that has produced two leak scandals in three years, and a labour market that offered 8,868 railway posts to 1.22 crore applicants. The student crowd is the oldest recurring actor in Indian politics, and the state's playbook against it has changed less since 1974 than the students have.
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Please Try Again
India built the world's largest public payment and identity system and made it free at the point of use. The costs did not vanish. They moved onto the people least able to carry them, and off the books the state keeps.
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The Epic Failure of the EPIC
India built its first electoral roll in 1950 on a single principle: that a citizen's vote should not wait on a citizen's paperwork. The Special Intensive Revision of 2025 and 2026 reversed that principle and struck tens of millions of names, in proportions that fell heaviest on women who moved at marriage, on Muslims in the districts where suspicion was cheapest to manufacture, and on the poor who never held the documents the Commission chose to trust. The one card the State prints to certify that a person is a voter did not make the list of papers that let you stay one.
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The Bill Comes Due: Five States, One Union, and the Arithmetic of Welfare After 2026
Five state governments spent April and May promising cash transfers they could not yet fully cost. The fiscal terms that determine whether they can keep those promises- a frozen devolution share, a lapsed compensation cess, a shrinking divisible pool- were set months before a single vote was cast, in rooms none of the winning parties controlled.
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An Island Off the Books: The Development Accounting Behind Great Nicobar
The government's case for the Great Nicobar mega-project rests on port throughput, jobs, and strategic gain. It does not count the rainforest, the Shompen, or the fault that the port will sit on. Put both columns in one ledger, and the project stops adding up, which is why the justification keeps moving.
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Welfare, Listed: India's Social Stock Exchange and the Market in Welfare
India has opened a route for companies to meet part of their legal duty to spend on social ends by buying instruments listed on a stock exchange. A bill now before a parliamentary committee would shrink the set of companies that owe the duty at all. Read together, the two moves narrow a public obligation and hand what survives of it to a market that has barely begun to function.
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The Dal Comes by Ship: India's Pulses Mission and Its Own Import Policy
Delhi has promised to buy every tur, urad and masoor a farmer offers, at a guaranteed price, and to make the country self-reliant in pulses by the end of the decade. It is also importing those same pulses duty-free, in quantities that pushed the home crop below the price it guaranteed—a reading of the first year.
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The Cash and the Category: How the BJP's Eastern Project Reconstituted Welfare Politics
Both elections on May 4 2026, were won through cash transfers, expanded right up to polling day. A month on, Bengal's new government has doubled its transfer and made it conditional on proof of citizenship. The cash continues; what changed is who the recipient is and who owns the politics of giving it.
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The Bill After the Raid
The Supreme Court's Prajwala judgment treats trafficking as what it is: a business that runs on other people's poverty. It then converts rehabilitation from a favour the State may grant into a right the State must fund. The harder question opens where the judgment closes: who pays, and whether the money will actually move.
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The Screen That Could Not Read
My son sits for his first board examinations two years from now, so I read this May's news from CBSE as a parent before I read it as an economist. The board moved Class XII evaluation onto computer screens, told students the machine had made the old right to a recheck unnecessary, then had to rescan sixty-eight thousand answer books because the machine could not read them. This is an account of a reform sold as transparency, the safeguard it took away, and the older habit it repeats.
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The Paper Travels First
On the afternoon of 3 May 2026, twenty-two lakh seventy-nine thousand young Indians sat for a medical entrance examination. Roughly 42 hours earlier, the questions had begun circulating on WhatsApp. This essay is about why that happens, why the legal apparatus built to prevent it fails to do so, and what twelve years of this pattern have cost the cohort it has trapped.
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Eleven Years, Six Asks: The Policy Ledger Behind Modi's Austerity Appeal
Seventy-three days into the Iran war, the Prime Minister asked Indians to cut fuel, defer foreign travel, postpone gold, reduce edible oil, revive work-from-home, and buy Indian. Citizens of any country with an import profile like India's would accept restraint in a crisis. The question is why this crisis arrived so unprepared for, after eleven years of Make in India, Atmanirbhar Bharat, and Aatmanirbharta. Each ask names a vulnerability the policy ledger was supposed to close. The bill is being presented to households because the ledger is not.
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Five Seats Short: The Mamallapuram Resort, the Tenth Schedule, and the Mathematics of Indian Defection
The Tamil Nadu impasse is not an aberration. It is the predictable output of a fragmented mandate, a tribunal designed to fail, and a politics of charismatic capture that has been producing and repeating itself in the state since 1948.
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The Road That Runs Back: India's Reverse Structural Transformation
India's agricultural employment share has been rising since 2018-19, reversing the Lewis-Kuznets path of structural change. The manufacturing window closed before workers leaving farms could pass through it. The MGNREGA floor has been knocked out, and the women left behind are recorded as employed for unpaid family labour.
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Reading the Centre's Books: What CAG Report No. 6 of 2026 Tells Us About Union Finances
The Comptroller and Auditor General's latest report on Union government finances presents four findings on how the Centre keeps its books. Read together, they describe a fiscal system in which the stated position of the accounts and the real position of the money no longer align.
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Counters Without Outcomes: The Chadha Defection and What India's Anti-Defection Law Was Built to Permit
In my first year of graduate school, the Indian politics seminar spent three weeks on the Tenth Schedule. Our professor walked us through Kihoto Hollohan with the brisk rhythm of someone who had taught it many times. The majority opinion got an hour. The Verma and Sharma dissent got fifteen minutes. The dissent, he said, made the better theoretical argument: the Speaker, dependent on the majority of the House for tenure, could not credibly adjudicate questions whose outcomes might affect that majority. The majority, however, was the practical view. Vesting the question elsewhere would invite years of litigation. The dissent was for the seminar room. The majority was for the country.
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What India Promised the Planet
Earth Day 2026 falls twenty-two days into the Sixteenth Finance Commission award period. It is a good time to ask who pays for the planet, and who has been paying all along.
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Women, Delimitation, and the Design of Representation Deferred
Three decades of randomised evidence from India's panchayats tell us what women in office actually do. On April 17, 2026, the Lok Sabha defeated a bill that used women's reservation as its label while carrying delimitation and parliamentary expansion that had little to do with women's reservation. The defeat was the win. The work ahead is to operationalise the 2023 Act on honest terms.
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The Economist Outside the Granary and the Court
B.R. Ambedkar produced some of the most original economic analyses in twentieth-century India, on land, labour, monetary policy, and fiscal federalism. Post-independence India's planning apparatus, upper-caste and technocratic, ensured his framework never reached the institutions that shaped development policy. On his birth anniversary, which this year falls on Baisakhi, the harvest festival, a century of data has made the case he never got to argue in the rooms that mattered.
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Census 2027 and the Politics of Not Knowing
Sixteen years without a census is not an administrative failure. It is a policy choice — one that has quietly determined who eats, who is represented, and whose existence the state acknowledges.
Varna

Varna

All things evidence-based!

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The Cockroaches Came Together

Varna

Please Try Again

Varna

The Epic Failure of the EPIC

Varna

The Bill Comes Due: Five States, One Union, and the Arithmetic of Welfare After 2026

Varna

An Island Off the Books: The Development Accounting Behind Great Nicobar

Varna

Welfare, Listed: India's Social Stock Exchange and the Market in Welfare

Varna

The Dal Comes by Ship: India's Pulses Mission and Its Own Import Policy

Varna

The Cash and the Category: How the BJP's Eastern Project Reconstituted Welfare Politics

Varna

The Bill After the Raid

Varna

The Screen That Could Not Read

Varna

The Paper Travels First

Varna

Eleven Years, Six Asks: The Policy Ledger Behind Modi's Austerity Appeal

Varna

Five Seats Short: The Mamallapuram Resort, the Tenth Schedule, and the Mathematics of Indian Defection

Varna

The Road That Runs Back: India's Reverse Structural Transformation

Varna

Reading the Centre's Books: What CAG Report No. 6 of 2026 Tells Us About Union Finances

Varna

Counters Without Outcomes: The Chadha Defection and What India's Anti-Defection Law Was Built to Permit

Varna

What India Promised the Planet

Varna

Women, Delimitation, and the Design of Representation Deferred

Varna

The Economist Outside the Granary and the Court

Varna

Census 2027 and the Politics of Not Knowing

Varna