Analysis

Briefs

89 briefs · page 2 of 8

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  Himachal Pradesh: the political economy of a special-category hill state

  Himachal Pradesh did not vote in 2026; its standing government is the one the Indian National Congress won in the November 2022 Vidhan Sabha election, 40 seats to the Bharatiya Janata Party's 28, and which survived a February 2024 defection crisis before by-elections restored its 40-seat count. The state is a small-weight unit of the federation — 68 Assembly seats, four Lok Sabha and three Rajya Sabha seats on a 2011 population of 6.86 million — and a structurally transfer-dependent one: a special-category state whose 2025-26 budget still ran a revenue deficit of 2.5 per cent of GSDP against committed salary-and-pension spending swollen by the 2023 restoration of the Old Pension Scheme, and whose revenue-deficit grant from the Union has been tapering. Its Centre-state politics runs mainly through the finance and power channels: Finance Commission transfers and borrowing limits, hydropower royalty and the Shanan and BBMB disputes, and recurring monsoon disaster on terrain where the 2025 season alone was put at 386 lives and thousands of crore in losses. This is the maintained topic brief on where that stands.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  Caste and reservation: India's quota architecture, its 50% ceiling and the count that reopens it

  India reserves 15% of central public jobs and college seats for Scheduled Castes, 7.5% for Scheduled Tribes, 27% for Other Backward Classes and, since 2019, 10% for economically weaker sections, against a Supreme Court ceiling of 50% that the EWS quota already crosses. The categories are defined by the President and Parliament, guarded by three constitutional commissions and policed by the courts, which have struck down state quotas — Maratha in 2021, Bihar's 65% in 2024 — for breaching the ceiling. The system's oldest gap is data: caste has not been counted beyond SC and ST since 1931. A 2025 Cabinet decision and a June 2025 gazette set the 2027 census to enumerate caste for all groups, reopening the empirical basis of the whole edifice. This brief tracks the numbers, the institutions and the range of positions actually held.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  India's demographics: the world's largest population, a below-replacement birth rate, and a census overdue

  India is the world's most populous country, with a UN-estimated 1.4286 billion people at mid-2023, yet its total fertility rate has fallen to 2.0 — below the 2.1 replacement level — so its continued growth now runs on demographic momentum rather than high birth rates. A large working-age majority gives India a time-limited "demographic dividend" that official projections put as peaking around 2041, even as the share of people aged 60 and over is projected to double to about 20.8% by 2050. The measurement system that underpins all of this is strained: the decennial census had not been completed since 2011. The next census (Census 2027) is now under way — house-listing opened in 2026 and population enumeration is referenced to 1 March 2027. This brief sets out the numbers, the institutions that produce them, and the debates — the dividend, ageing, migration and the delimitation of parliamentary seats — as they stand.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  India's human development: the outcomes and the instruments that measure them

  India's human development runs on broad improvement and persistent gaps at once. Literacy for those aged 7 and over reached 80.9% in 2023-24; the NITI Aayog estimates multidimensional poverty fell from 29.17% in 2013-14 to 11.28% in 2022-23; and the UNDP put India's Human Development Index at 0.685 in 2023, ranked 130th of 193 countries. Yet child stunting sat at 35.5% and anaemia among women rose to 57% in NFHS-5, a majority of rural schoolchildren still read below grade in ASER 2024, and life expectancy dipped in the SRS 2017-21 tables. This brief separates what the instruments agree on from what they contest, and attributes each claim to the body that made it.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  India's informal economy: measuring it, covering it, and the drive to formalise it

  Around nine-tenths of India's workforce earns a living outside formal, regular, salaried employment — the self-employed, casual labourers and unregistered micro-enterprises that the Economic Survey has put at roughly half of GDP. The state now works this reality on three fronts: it measures informality through the Periodic Labour Force Survey, whose headline unemployment rate stays low even as self-employment remains the single largest category of work; it tries to cover the uncovered through registries and schemes, with 31.78 crore unorganised workers enrolled on e-Shram and the Code on Social Security now reaching gig and platform workers; and it tries to formalise, drawing micro units onto Udyam and jobs into the provident-fund net. The recurring dispute is the same across all three: registration and a low unemployment rate are not the same as secure, formal, adequately paid work — and the numbers are read differently by the government and its critics. This is the maintained topic brief on where it stands as of 2026-07-28.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  India's employment question: participation, jobless growth, and what PLFS measures

  India's official labour numbers tell an unusually favourable story: the Periodic Labour Force Survey puts the usual-status unemployment rate for those 15 and above at around 3-5%, records the female labour-force participation rate nearly doubling from 23.3% in 2017-18 to 41.7% in 2023-24, and reports youth unemployment falling to 9.9% in 2025. The dispute is not about the headline rate but about what sits beneath it. Self-employment is the single largest category of work at 56.2% of workers, a majority of the workforce is informal, and much of the rise in women's participation is concentrated in rural agriculture and unpaid family labour rather than paid, regular jobs. This brief characterises the structural picture, the institutions and surveys that produce the numbers, and the "jobless growth" debate — where the government reads the data as improvement and many economists read it as distress-driven informalisation. State of play as of 2026-07-28.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-17 · updated 2026-07-28

  India's legislature in mid-2026: a defeated constitutional amendment, an ordinance to ratify, and a Monsoon Session with 19 sittings

  Parliament reconvenes on 20 July 2026 for a Monsoon Session of 19 sittings, three months after the Lok Sabha did something it had not done before in this government's tenure: it rejected a constitutional amendment. The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026 — the Lok Sabha expansion and delimitation package — was negatived on 17 April 2026, taking two companion bills down with it. The session's listed business is dominated by second attempts and ratifications: a Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, a higher education regulator that would replace the UGC and AICTE, and bills to replace ordinances the executive promulgated while the Houses were not sitting. The structural story underneath is scrutiny: PRS data shows one of ten bills introduced in the last session went to a committee.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  Religion and the law: India's secular framework and its live legal fronts

  India is a constitutionally secular state that leaves family life to religion-specific personal laws — a settlement built on Articles 25-28 (freedom of religion), Articles 29-30 (minority rights) and the unenforced Article 44 directive toward a Uniform Civil Code. As of 28 July 2026 three fronts are active. The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, which freezes the religious character of shrines as on 15 August 1947, is under challenge in the Supreme Court, which has barred all fresh suits and surveys since December 2024. The Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 recast the law governing Islamic endowments and was partly stayed by the Supreme Court in September 2025. And Uttarakhand became the first state to enforce a Uniform Civil Code, on 27 January 2025. This brief characterises the framework, the institutions and data behind it, and the range of positions actually held on each front.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  India's urban transition and migration: the gap between city growth and municipal capacity

  India is urbanising and moving, but it measures and governs the process through fragmented, ageing systems. The last complete Census is 2011, when 31.16% of Indians were urban and about 45.36 crore (37%) were internal migrants; a delayed Census with reference date 1 March 2027 and a dedicated National Migration Survey for 2026-27 are the first serious attempts to refresh that picture in over a decade. The Periodic Labour Force Survey put the 2020-21 migration rate at 28.9%. The structural theme running through all of it is a capacity gap: the Reserve Bank finds municipal revenue at around 0.6% of GDP, city populations and informal settlements outgrow the finances meant to serve them, and the migrant workers who build the cities remain thinly counted and, after the 2020 labour-code changes, contested in their legal protections. This brief separates the verified structure from the live debates and attributes each.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  India's welfare state: the JAM trinity, DBT and the fiscal weight of subsidies

  India's welfare state now runs on a digital plumbing layer — the JAM trinity of Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar identity and mobile phones — that routes benefits directly into bank accounts under the Direct Benefit Transfer system, sitting alongside the older in-kind Public Distribution System. As of 2026, more than 56 crore Jan Dhan accounts hold Rs 2.68 lakh crore, Aadhaar covers about 99% of adults, and the government reports Rs 6.9 lakh crore credited through DBT schemes in FY 2024-25. The state provides free foodgrains to 81.35 crore people under PMGKAY, and food and fertiliser subsidies alone are budgeted above Rs 3.7 lakh crore for 2025-26. The settled facts are the scale and the plumbing; the contest is over how much "leakage" was really saved, how many genuine beneficiaries the system excludes, and whether the design leans toward tighter targeting or broader universality.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  Jammu and Kashmir: the political economy of a demoted, transfer-fed Union Territory

  Jammu and Kashmir is the only unit of the Republic demoted from statehood to Union Territory, and the only legislature-holding UT whose elected government does not control police and public order — both rest with the Union through the Lieutenant Governor. Its first elected government since 2018 took office in October 2024, a National Conference-led INDIA-bloc ministry that won 49 of the 90 elected seats. Its public finances are the sharpest expression of its federal position: a budgeted 2026-27 GSDP of about Rs 3,15,822 crore on which central transfers fund roughly 65 per cent of revenue receipts, producing the paradox of a revenue surplus alongside a fiscal deficit near 4.6 per cent of GSDP and outstanding liabilities around 48 per cent of GSDP. The live Centre-state fault lines are not resource royalties but the constitutional ones: an undelivered restoration of statehood, an elected ministry sharing the executive with a Union-appointed LG whose discretionary powers were widened in 2024, and a budget process that only recently returned from Parliament to the assembly. This is the maintained topic brief on where that stands.

• Topic · maintained 2026-07-28

  Jharkhand: the political economy of a resource state that is not a rich state

  As of 28 July 2026, Jharkhand is governed by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-led Mahagathbandhan — the state wing of the INDIA bloc — which the November 2024 assembly election returned with 56 of 81 seats, the first back-to-back mandate for a sitting government since the state was carved out of Bihar in 2000. Jharkhand did not go to the polls in 2026, so this is a standing government at the mid-point of its term. The defining fact of the unit is a structural asymmetry: it sits on one of India's densest coal, iron-ore and copper belts and supplies a large share of national mineral output, yet its per capita income is roughly 54% of the national average. Its politics is organised around two Centre-state seams that outlast any government — the Fifth Schedule regime that protects tribal land, and the fiscal claim on the rent from the minerals extracted within it, which the state puts at Rs 1.36 lakh crore in unpaid coal dues and which the 2024 Supreme Court royalty ruling reopened in the state's favour. This is the maintained topic brief on where all of that stands.