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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When a government directive carries the force of law and a fifteen-day comment window counts as consultation, the question is not whether platforms comply — it is who decides what compliance means.
On World Health Day 2026, India has 70 crore people enrolled in health insurance and 37 million stunted children. These two facts are not unrelated.
Tamil Nadu's unconditional cash transfer to women is evidence-backed and meaningful. The harder question is whether the state that built the Dravidian welfare model needed to follow the rest of India down this road.
Fifty years of amendments, one direction of travel: how the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act became the instrument through which the Indian state removes the organisations that hold it to account.
On 24 March 2026, the Supreme Court declared that caste-based constitutional protections end at the church door. The judgment is legally tidy and empirically wrong. It also rests on a political architecture that was never principled to begin with, and has been reproduced, intact, across seven decades, six commissions, and four governments.
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.