Tag
Poverty
India's elderly population will more than double by 2050. A journalistic look at pension coverage that reaches one in five, families scattered by migration, and the care infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.
One State One Story
In 1999, a super cyclone killed nearly 10,000 people in Odisha. By 2019, the state was evacuating over a million people ahead of Cyclone Fani and drawing UN praise. How Odisha built that turnaround, and what it still hasn't fixed.
Questions India Must Answer
India built a Right to Repair portal in 2022, but not a law. As the EU and US states pass binding repair obligations, India's framework stays voluntary. What is the country actually choosing?
Poverty
Nearly three in ten Indians are migrants, official data shows, yet the last full count came from a pandemic-year survey. What the numbers actually say.
Poverty
India's out-of-pocket health share fell from 64.2% to 43.4% over a decade, per NHA data. The lowest point, 2021-22, was one-time COVID spending.
Governance
India's land titles are presumptive, not guaranteed. PRS data on the two-thirds land-dispute estimate, the mutation gap, and what digitisation has not fixed.
Governance
Indians are among the most vocal critics of their own public services and among the least willing to comply with the rules those services run on. That contradiction is not hypocrisy. It is a rational response to a state that does not reciprocate, and it can be broken from either end.
Governance
The most powerful instrument in Indian public administration is not a law or a budget. It is the ability to move an officer. Fixed tenure has been recommended, litigated and ordered for decades, and it still does not hold.
Governance
More than twenty Indian states have laws giving citizens a legal right to receive government services within a fixed time, with a penalty on the officer who misses it. Almost nobody uses them, and almost no penalty is ever paid.
Governance
Refusing to register a First Information Report is unlawful in India for cognisable offences, and it happens every day. The reasons are structural, the remedies exist in law, and almost nobody knows what they are.
Governance
Across India's police forces, judiciary and prisons, roughly one in four sanctioned posts is vacant. Every complaint about slow investigation, delayed trials and overcrowded jails runs back to that single number.
Governance
India held about 3.71 lakh undertrial prisoners out of a prison population of roughly 5.11 lakh. More than 9,000 had been inside for over five years without a conviction. This is what happens when court delay meets a bail system that runs on money.
Governance
India's courts carried 5.39 crore pending cases at the end of 2025, with more than 1.8 lakh of them pending over thirty years. The backlog is not a mystery of court culture. It is a staffing ratio, and the arithmetic is public.
Governance
India's global corruption ranking measures what experts think. The survey that asked citizens what actually happened to them found a bribery rate of 39 per cent, the highest in Asia, with half of those saying they paid because they were asked.
Governance
Indian cities generate a large share of national output and run on budgets a mid-sized European town would find small. Municipal corporations raise about half their revenue themselves, smaller towns far less, and almost none of it is enough for what a city is legally required to provide.
Governance
India gave its village governments constitutional status in 1993. More than thirty years later they raise about 1.1 per cent of their revenue themselves and depend on transfers for the rest, which is why the body closest to citizens can decide the least.
Today in History
On March 1, 1872, the British colonial administration completed India's first comprehensive census, a huge effort to count about 240 million people without modern transport or maps.
Environment
India holds just 4% of global freshwater for 18% of the world's population. With 600 million Indians facing extreme water stress, groundwater reserves vanishing, and 21 major cities projected to run dry by 2030, the water crisis demands urgent action. From Chennai's Day Zero to farmer suicides in Marathwada, here is the full picture, causes, human cost, and solutions that could still turn the tide.
Governance
The Right to Information Act 2005 gives every Indian citizen the power to question the government, demand accountability, and expose corruption, yet most people have never filed a single RTI application. Here is your complete guide to using India's most powerful transparency law.
