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Much needs to be done and our destination is still several countries away — the 73 million Indians living in extreme poverty today add up to more than the populations of Thailand, France and the UK.

Libya’s headline growth hides a zombie economy—propped up by oil, crippled by fake currency, and stalled by deep political fractures

With increasing awareness of the role that a healthy and clean environment plays in the well-being of societies, governments are adopting environment-friendly approaches in the conduct of development activities. This brief examines the environment planning proposals contained in the draft Master Plan for Delhi (MPD) for the period 2021-41. Although the MPD proposes many new ideas to improve prevailing conditions as well as a framework to monitor

Before the rise of Xi Jinping—before the Beijing Olympics and the South China Sea tensions and the China-India border crisis—the late former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had already sensed that a rising China would pose daunting challenges to its neighbours and the regional order. This brief argues that without Abe, there would likely have been no ‘Quad’ grouping joining Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. His re

Despite advancements in legislation and representation over the last decades, women continue to face barriers in accessing sexual and reproductive healthcare, legal protection against violence, and leadership roles. In the economic sphere, gender disparities persist in labour force participation, job sectors, wages, and unpaid care work. Women are constrained in participating in the labour market as their social role remains attached to domestic

New Delhi is cognisant of the future viability of the Northern Sea Route, given the further thawing of the Arctic and the prospect of improved relations between Russia and other Arctic states over the long term. 

Coinciding with the third anniversary of the start of the US military strikes in Afghanistan on October 7,2004,code-named Op. Enduring Freedom, terrorist elements, suspected to be from Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF), have carried out four co-ordinated terrorist strikes involving explosives on October 7 and 8,2004.

The security problem of Japan is something of a Gordian Knot. A feeling is spreading among Japanese that they have seen the American forces on their land for too long, for sixty-five years continuously, and the people are fed up with them.

The Government of India is reported to have advised a short postponement of the departure of the Indian cricket team to Bangladesh to play in some matches against the Bangladesh team at Dhaka and Chittagong following the receipt at the Indian High Commission in Dhaka of a fax message purported to have been signed by an organisation called Harkat-ul-Jihad warning of dire consequences if the team went ahead with the visit.

The BJP has achieved a lot in the areas of governance, growth and ease of doing business. The party currently appears to be in a strong position for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Rex Tillerson’s inaugural visit to India will set the tone for the next phase in U.S.-India ties.

Now, we have single party majority government at the Centre and in Delhi. For both BJP and AAP winning the election was the easy part, relatively. The hard part to fulfill promises, to give least government and maximum governance has just begun.

The new NSS survey clearly shows that 8 per cent GDP growth of the last five years has not translated into a higher level of job creation. There was a dramatic deceleration in total employment growth. And this means that India has been experiencing jobless growth during the last five years.

India is now extending 'visa on arrival' to tourists from 180 countries to encourage tourism. But budget tourists, who aim at staying in small hotels/guest houses and not five-star hotels, face problems in finding clean and safe accommodation.

With two resolutions in as many days relating to neighbouring Sri Lanka, both moved by Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, the Tamil Nadu Assembly has revived complex pan-Tamil issues nearer home, with consequences flowing from across the world.

If the rest of India was ¿shocked¿ over the Tamil Nadu police arresting the Kanchi Sankaracharya in a murder case, it was equally surprised over the passivity of the people in the State, whom they expected would have taken to the streets in protest.

The private sector, through its technical expertise, sector-specific knowledge and ability to design unique, cutting-edge innovations, can devise effective long-term solutions to two of the major challenges government is faced with — lack of technological solutions and large-scale monitoring

The Modi government appears to have abandoned the multi-pronged policy of its predecessor of simultaneously engaging Islamabad and dealing with cross-border terrorism. This government made a surprise beginning with the idea of promoting South Asian unity . But since then it has been fixated on countering terrorism at the cost of everything else, though Pakistani covert activity in India has seen a sharp decline since 2008.

With the Delhi Durbar at its dysfunctional worst, power is flowing away from Delhi to State capitals, where some strong men and women are ruling. India's external partners tend to see this with much greater clarity than the domestic observers of Delhi's current listlessness.

In the context of private data protection versus the State, the committee’s recommendations are fairly status quoist.

Climate change exacerbates HMPV spread in India, requiring proactive measures like improved healthcare access, climate-health database, and AI-driven outbreak prediction for better crisis response.

The 2021 Conference of Parties 26 (COP26) propelled nations to ramp up their climate targets and the concomitant Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. However, the updated NDCs and the announced pledges for 2030 remain insufficient and poorly aligned with the targets of the Paris Agreement. The reduction in projected 2030 emissions is estimated to be 7.5 percent—far lower than the 30 percent requi

Minister for Consumer Affairs Ram Vilas Paswan has chosen three unorthodox areas to show his department’s proactivity.

In recent years, India has become a hot investment destination for Chinese companies. While Chinese investments in India have come under greater scrutiny following the 2020 Galwan incident, this has done little to reverse Chinese enterprises’ strong appetite for the Indian market. At the same time, Beijing is increasingly concerned that in their rush to capitalise on the Indian market, Chinese companies are embracing the ‘Make in India’ pol

Where India’s relations with individual EU nations have progressed dramatically over the last few years and the EU’s focus on India has grown, it has become imperative for the two to give each other a serious look.

Amidst increasing global connectivity and accelerating global change, the global security framework has become insufficient, contributing to a crippling dysfunctionality in international cooperation. The current security framework, focused almost exclusively on a narrow notion of military security, is insufficient to address escalating ‘threats without enemy,’ such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, which increasingly endang

The Indian Ocean, a vast maritime expanse, features diverse social, spatial, and topographical characteristics. This diversity is evident in the various actors operating independently, with minimal synergy, political unity, and distinct challenges, across its sub-regions. In this context, what does the maritime security architecture in the region look like? This brief finds that it remains fragmented, and makes a case for nurturing its cohesivene

Public transportation (PT) planning in Indian cities has historically focused on private vehicles and rail-based systems while neglecting bus-based transit. Such planning has led to fragmented urban mobility solutions. This study evaluates the effectiveness of PT systems planning in India by assessing the present state of these systems and analysing planning practices. It summarises the characteristics of various PT modes and the expert guideline

The EU would need to be confident that an Indian carbon export levy would not be rebated back to industry but genuinely drive decarbonisation

In an effort to facilitate the digitisation of the country’s healthcare systems, India released a National Digital Health Blueprint in January 2020, which provides a detailed framework for a “Federated National Health Information System.” This brief makes a case for expanding the scope of the blueprint to include digital therapeutics, digital diagnostics, and telemedicine. It proposes a “National Digital Health Blueprint 2.0,” with dive

While India’s malnutrition rates have dropped dramatically, the country is still home to the largest number of stunted and wasted children in the world. Owing to the cultural and geographical variance across states, combatting malnutrition requires a granular approach. POSHAN Abhiyaan, the government’s national nutrition mission launched in 2017, aims to provide a convergence mechanism for the country’s response to malnutrition. This specia

A number of important treaties of immense strategic significance have been signed during Prime Minister Vajpayee's first ever visit to Tajikistan on November 14. The agreements signed were related to setting up a Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, a bilateral extradition treaty and military ties.

The need for integrated water resource management (IWRM) has been explored and articulated by many water professionals over the recent years. Today, such a holistic approach to the management of water systems has become even more imperative in the context of the global crisis in water for which no easy solution is yet in sight. This brief calls for the development and institutionalisation of the interdisciplinary approach of integrated water syst

Grasslands that provide a variety of ecosystem services for humans—including carbon storage, which is important to mitigating climate change—are among the world’s most threatened habitats. In India, grassy ecosystems are not accorded any legal protection. Vast acres of these grasslands are converted for revenue-generating use, altering their ecological dynamics and threatening the livelihoods and cultures of pastoral and agrarian communitie

Executed properly, Aadhaar could become a central pillar of India’s ‘neighbourhood first’ policy.

In April 2023, the Supreme Court of India advocated for the government to establish a "uniform national policy" on menstrual health and hygiene (MHH), spotlighting the need for comprehensive measures on a significant public health issue. This brief traces India's path to promoting MHH, highlighting key policy initiatives and their impact on period product usage. Using secondary data from the National Family Health Survey-5, this brief introduces

This paper examines the environmental and policy-level challenges to the actualisation of US-India counterterrorism cooperation. Indeed, despite their seeming convergence on the imperative of effective counterterrorism, there has been limited cooperation between the two countries. While the US’ sense of “American exceptionalism” and its hegemon status purports a utilitarian notion of the adversary, India’s regional power status makes its

Text of the keynote address delivered by Prof. K. V. Kesavan in the symposium Changing Perception of Japan in South Asia in the New Asian Era: State of Japanese Studies in India and other SAARC Countries

Digital spaces are becoming increasingly vital for public deliberation on issues of shared interest, including during electoral campaigns. This brief examines the types of discourse on social media platforms that electoral candidates engage in. It studies the content of the online campaigns and their potential impact on voter education, and recommends countermeasures against the threat of uninformed and unethical online narratives that only

Policy clarity is needed to deal with the idea of a weapons system that surrenders life-and-death decisions to machines. ICRC is an independent humanitarian organisation set up in 1863, that has been playing an active part in discussions around the subject of AWS

The application of emerging technologies will play a key role in the performance of India’s armed forces. All three services understand the significance of these technological innovations in modern warfare, although their development has been uneven across the branches. This analysis provides an overview of how far the three services of the Indian armed forces have gone in integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI), cyber technology, and

Goal seven of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) commits the international community to providing access to clean cooking fuels and technologies to all by 2030. Progress has been slow, however, and in about 40 of the UN’s 189 member countries for which data is available, more that 80 percent of the populations continue to lack such access. Using case studies, this brief analyses the role of a country’s policies, i

At least 4 billion people around the world are yet to be covered by any form of social security, and therefore vulnerable to economic, social, and environmental shocks. This paper examines the state of social security in the Group of Twenty (G20) economies—home to 63 percent of the global population. It finds gaps in social security financing in these countries: between universal coverage and actual coverage, and between countries of the Global

In 2019, the Indian Railways (IR) recorded zero fatalities from accidents caused by operational errors. However, many people continue to meet with train-related mishaps that are beyond the IR’s control; many of these accidents result in death. The IR’s experience in preventing deaths in accidents caused by operational errors (technically called “consequential accidents”) offers lessons on minimising all railways-related fatalities. This p

India-Russia relations have gone through a number of phases since their formal establishment in April 1947. Despite repeated projections of its decline following the end of the Cold War, India and Russia’s strategic partnership has persisted, and indeed in some areas has deepened. This brief argues that this could only mean that there is plausible geopolitical logic for both countries to persevere in strengthening their ties. It gives a histori

The cornerstone of any Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) programme, especially for global targets such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and its successor, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is quality, comprehensive and real-time data. Without such data, M&E processes and operations are neither reliable nor relevant. This rule applies, for example, to targets related to nutrition and hunger-without effective nutrition monit

The pace of Indian infrastructure building along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) bordering China has historically been slow due to financial and doctrinal constraints, but has accelerated in the past 20 years. Construction has become more efficient owing to bureaucratic changes and the infusion of greater financial resources. This paper attributes these changes to strategic compulsions brought about by Chinese actions—both diplomatic and on-th

India has recorded notable progress in maternal and child health in the recent years. The state of Madhya Pradesh (MP), however, has performed sub-optimally compared to most states and union territories (UTs) of India. MP’s annual reduction in maternal mortality rate (MMR), for example, is at 5.8 percent, compared to the national average of 7.5 percent; the yearly drop in neonatal mortality rate (NMR) is at 0.6 percent, far below the national a

This paper creates an index to track the achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation) across India’s states. The SDG 6 index incorporates both supply-side indicators and demand management variables, as well as institutional interventions. In this paper, state-wise indices are constructed to identify their respective performances in the domains of access to clean water and provision of sanitation facilitie