Op-Eds

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

New research shows forests, wetlands and blue-carbon ecosystems are absorbing far less CO₂ under heat stress, threatening India’s net-zero pathway When policymakers tally national climate progress, they often balance a country’s emissions with the carbon captured by forests, wetlands, and coasts — nature’s “negative emissions”. The logic appears straightforward: Plant more trees, lock away more carbon,...   Read More

India needs a nationwide, real-time groundwater monitoring system with open access to data so communities know what they are drinking and irrigating with On a sweltering afternoon in Punjab, a farmer lowers his bucket into the well that has sustained his family for generations. The water looks clear, but tests reveal a different story: uranium...   Read More

The borrowed metaphor now obscures more than it explains.    Since the 1997 Asian crisis, financial stability – macro-financial stability more broadly – has been the primary objective of global finance, shaping the work of central banks, finance ministries, the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board. Today, ‘resilience’ has taken its place. Authorities...   Read More