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.
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.
Poverty
When a state advertises a few hundred posts requiring basic literacy and receives applications from engineers, postgraduates and doctorate holders, it is not a quirky news story. It is the clearest available measure of what an Indian degree is now worth.
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
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.
Poverty
India's entrance exams are formally free of tuition and effectively priced. The coaching economy that sits between a school syllabus and a rank list is the largest hidden education expense most families carry, and it decides outcomes before the exam begins.
Education
Weeks of youth led protest through June and July 2026 ended with a resignation. The five demands the movement put forward were far more specific than the coverage suggested, and four of them can be implemented without new legislation.
Education
For two decades India closed teacher shortages with contract, guest and para teachers on short renewable terms. It filled the vacancy column on paper and built a parallel workforce doing the same job for a fraction of the pay.
Education
India's 2026 school audit found that only 10 to 15 per cent of government school teachers score above 60 per cent in the subject they are paid to teach. That finding is about the system that trained them, not about them.
Poverty
Across 15 states, 41 recruitment exam leak cases hit about 1.4 crore applicants competing for just over one lakh posts. The leak is only part of it. The bigger loss is the years spent waiting between the advertisement and the appointment.
Education
India cancelled its national medical entrance exam on 12 May 2026 after a circulated guess paper matched the real one. Here is what that decision cost the families who sat it, and why the leak keeps happening.
Education
A government audit released in May 2026 counted more than one lakh Indian schools running on a single teacher, and about 99,000 without a girls' toilet. Here is what those numbers mean for the children inside them, and what would actually fix it.
India vs World
In 1948, Costa Rica did something no country had done before: it abolished its military and redirected defence spending to schools and hospitals. Seventy-six years later, it ranks as the happiest nation in the Americas, with a life expectancy of 81, a literacy rate of 97%, and a $4-billion ecotourism economy. India spends 2.4% of GDP on defence and only 2.1% on health. The math - and the lesson - deserve a hard look.
