Op-Eds

Women form close to 42% of farm workers. Skilling schemes specifically designed for women is imperative to not only raise their productivity but also to empower them. India’s agriculture stands at a critical crossroads. On the one hand, rapid technological transformation — from drones and digital platforms to precision farming — is reshaping how crops...   Read More

The 30 ‘critical minerals’ pose different risk levels. India’s critical minerals strategy stands at a crossroads. In June 2023, the Government of India released a list of 30 critical minerals through a systematic three-stage assessment process evaluating economic importance, strategic value, and import dependencies. Yet two years later, policy implementation treats all 30 minerals with...   Read More

Rather than viewing employment generation solely through the lens of large industry or government programmes, policy must confront the reality that employment generation is tied to improving the productivity of its smallest enterprises The recently announced new labour codes are likely to transform the employment landscape of India. The discourse on employment, however, primarily centres...   Read More

An NCAER survey shows that Indian firms seemed to have weathered the US tariff storm, for now Amidst the international uncertainty caused by rapid announcements of US trade policies balanced by rationalisation of GST rates, business sentiments as measured by the NCAER Business Confidence Index (BCI) had eased in the second quarter of 2025-26. The...   Read More

The continent’s bid to rebalance global finance  Could there be a moratorium on further studies diagnosing what ails African development? The continent has been examined, measured and prescribed to exhaustion – yet the patient deteriorates. Since 2000, multilateral institutions have catalogued the same barriers: mispriced capital, unsustainable debt, illicit outflows, and governance asymmetries. What Africa...   Read More

Real-time digital hiring signals, analysed through AI, offer India a powerful new way to anticipate and close emerging skill gaps India’s debate on skills often concentrate on curriculum reforms, institutional capacity, and the widening gap between education and employer needs. However, a more fundamental challenge concerns our ability to interpret the labour market almost in...   Read More

Though the incidence of son preference in Indian families has fallen, there is still little preference for daughters. Instead of asking parents, just count their children to get a sense of what India genuinely values. From 1.33 males for every girl at the first birth to 1.43 at the second and 1.51 at the third,...   Read More

2026 will determine whether philosophical ambition becomes institutional reality.   At the G20’s 20th meeting in Johannesburg in November 2025, the Declaration placed the African humanist Ubuntu philosophy – ‘I am because we are’ – at the centre of its framing for global economic governance. This was more than rhetorical flourish. The statement reflects a...   Read More

The challenge is to produce green hydrogen without depleting water reserves. Using seawater could be a viable alternative. It is not often that a single molecule captures the imagination of an entire nation. But hydrogen — the lightest element on Earth — is suddenly carrying the heaviest expectations of India’s clean-energy transition. In global climate...   Read More

The regulation should ensure that flexibility is for real, with no incentive structure that seeks to distort it. What does the word ‘flexibility’ mean in the context of platform work? The two stakeholders, platforms and the workers, are debating the term. The platforms argue they offer ‘flexibility’ but workers disagree. But both the workers and...   Read More