Op-Eds

As India deepens financial inclusion through digital tools, World Investor Week 2025 urges regulators and citizens to address behavioural biases, fraud risks, and digital trust gaps. Access to investing has expanded dramatically through digital platforms and mobile tools, aided by the JAM Trinity and Aadhaar-enabled services. Yet, the behavioural vulnerabilities of investors remain as prominent...   Read More

Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? The provocative question, once aimed at the Father of Modern Economics, echoes with particular resonance in India. The book is a critique of Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ postulation and challenges the very foundation of economic measurement, pointing to the vast, uncounted economy of unpaid labour, performed predominantly by women, that fuels...   Read More

For India, agricultural protection is similar to US anxiety on immigration. Once, I took a group of American students to learn more about the rural parts of India. We spent a couple of weeks in a village, where the students were constantly trailed by giggling children, several of them shouting out questions. So, we decided...   Read More

The hidden costs countries now accept for strategic resilience. A new principle is reshaping global finance: the sovereignty premium – the economic cost countries willingly pay for financial autonomy. This premium functions as geopolitical insurance, a calculated payment to build structural resilience against exclusion while securing self-determination. For an increasing number of states, economic efficiency now...   Read More

A structured care-giving industry can not only meet a vital social need but also generate large-scale employment, spur health-tech innovation, and create new public-private models of welfare. India is often described as a young country, but the truth is that it is also ageing faster. As per a report by NITI Aayog, the elderly in...   Read More

India's agricultural future hinges on aligning water and crop calendars to combat the dual threats of drought stress and waterlogging Summary India’s farms thrive when water arrives in sync with crop needs – but that harmony is breaking down. Mistimed irrigation brings twin threats: drought stress and waterlogging, both devastating for smallholders. Erratic monsoons and...   Read More

Training, targeted support can make a difference. India’s livestock sector is experiencing a transformation, and women are at its core. The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) and NCAER (2025) study titled, ‘National Skill Gap Study for High Growth Sectors’, assessed the skill shortages and gaps in the sector, ‘raising cattle and buffaloes’. The...   Read More

From IT corridors to gig platforms, urban job markets remain stratified by caste, religion and gender. It’s time to make inclusion a core goal of labour policy. In India’s largest cities, a Muslim woman with a university degree is still more likely to be shut out of a white-collar job than her equally qualified peers...   Read More

To the GST Council’s credit, it went beyond the elimination of two rate slabs and delved into fine details to fix structural anomalies in this tax regimes. It broad-bases rates for like goods, corrects inverted duties and clusters products by their end use. The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council has finally spoken its mind...   Read More

The political economy of fiscal and financial blind spots. Financial surveillance fails when it matters most. Every major financial disruption – from the 1997 Asian crisis to the 2008 financial crisis or recent geopolitical shocks from wars, sanctions and trade realignments – has exposed how blind spots persist in national systems, regional arrangements and global...   Read More