Analysis
Briefs
89 briefs · page 6 of 8
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's judiciary: appointments, pendency and reform
India is almost the only major democracy in which the higher judiciary chooses its own judges — through the collegium, a creature of Supreme Court judgments rather than statute. Parliament's attempt to replace it with a National Judicial Appointments Commission was struck down in 2015 as a breach of the Constitution's basic structure, and the collegium has run ever since without a finalised rulebook: the Memorandum of Procedure has been deadlocked since 2015. Layered on top is a pendency crisis — more than 5.6 crore cases across all courts and record backlogs at the Supreme Court — which drove a 2026 expansion of the Court's sanctioned strength from 34 to 38 judges. This is the maintained topic brief on where the appointments contest, the backlog and the reform debate stand as of 2026-07-06.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's maritime agenda: Sagarmala, port capacity, and Maritime Amrit Kaal 2047
India's maritime programme runs on three stacked plans owned by the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways: the Sagarmala port-led development programme (2015), Maritime India Vision 2030, and the Maritime Amrit Kaal Vision 2047 launched in October 2023, which sets a stated target of about 10,000 MTPA of port capacity by 2047. Major-port capacity roughly doubled from 800.5 MTPA in 2014 to about 1,630 MTPA by March 2024, and new deep-draft gateways at Vadhavan and Vizhinjam are being built to add transshipment capacity India has long lacked. In 2025 Parliament replaced the Merchant Shipping Act 1958 and enacted a standalone Coastal Shipping Act, while the 2025-26 Budget proposed a Maritime Development Fund and extended shipbuilding subsidies. This brief characterises the state of play and the range of positions actually held.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's four Labour Codes and the jobs question
On 21 November 2025 India brought its four Labour Codes into force, consolidating 29 central labour statutes passed between 2019 and 2020 into a single framework covering wages, industrial relations, social security and occupational safety. The government frames the codes as the biggest labour reform since independence — universalising a floor wage, extending social security to gig and platform workers, and simplifying compliance. Ten central trade unions call the rollout a "deceptive fraud" and demand withdrawal, objecting to higher thresholds for retrenchment and standing orders, tighter conditions on strikes, and notification without convening the Indian Labour Conference. The codes are in force but their operational rules are still in draft, and both sides argue over the same underlying problem: whether the reform does anything about the shortage of formal jobs. This is the maintained topic brief on where it stands as of 2026-07-06.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's media and digital-content regulation: the broadcasting framework and the IT Rules interface
India regulates its media through three overlapping regimes that the state has spent the 2020s trying to reconcile: a legacy broadcasting framework built on the 1995 Cable TV Act, a film-certification regime under the Cinematograph Act, and a digital-content regime under Part III of the IT Rules 2021. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting owns most of this, but digital content is split with MeitY, and an attempt to fuse it all — the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill — was withdrawn in 2024. This is the maintained topic brief on where that architecture stands as of 2026-07-06, after the government moved broadcasting authorisation into the Telecommunications Act framework while leaving digital content under the IT Rules.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's MSME sector: credit access, the Udyam formalisation drive, and the revised classification
India's micro, small and medium enterprises are counted by the Ministry of MSME at roughly 30 percent of GDP and 45 percent of exports, yet the sector has long carried a credit gap the RBI's own expert committee put at Rs 20-25 lakh crore. Two policy levers dominate the current picture: a formalisation drive through the Udyam portal, which now records over 6 crore enterprises, and a revised classification that from April 2025 raised investment and turnover ceilings by 2.5x and 2x. Alongside these, the 2025-26 Budget doubled the credit-guarantee cover for micro and small firms to Rs 10 crore and introduced a Rs 5 lakh credit card for micro units. This brief tracks how classification, formalisation and credit access fit together, and attributes each claim.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's nuclear-energy expansion: the three-stage programme, SMRs, and civil-nuclear liability reform
India runs about 8,180 MWe of nuclear capacity from 24 reactors and has set a stated target of 100 GW by 2047, anchored on the Department of Atomic Energy's three-stage programme, which reached a milestone when the Kalpakkam prototype fast breeder reactor attained criticality in April 2026. The Union Budget 2025-26 launched a Nuclear Energy Mission with Rs 20,000 crore for small modular reactor research and a goal of at least five indigenously designed SMRs by 2033. In December 2025 Parliament passed the SHANTI Act, repealing the Atomic Energy Act, 1962 and the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010, opening nuclear licensing to Indian private companies and rewriting the liability regime. This brief tracks the expansion plan, the reactor build-out, and the liability and regulatory reform, attributing each claim and making no forecast.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's official statistics: GDP estimation, the base-year revision, and data credibility
On 27 February 2026 the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation released a new series of national accounts with base year 2022-23, replacing the 2011-12 base that had governed GDP measurement since January 2015. The new series rebuilds how the economy is measured — folding in GST, e-commerce, digital-payment and administrative data — and pegged real GDP growth at 7.6% for 2025-26, while analysts noted it lowered the nominal size of the economy by roughly 3-4% against the old base. The rebasing lands on top of a longer argument about the credibility of Indian official data, sharpened by the 2018 GDP back-series dispute and the 2019 withholding of employment and consumption results that drove independent members of the National Statistical Commission to resign. This brief tracks what the statistical system measures, what the 2022-23 series changed, and the range of positions actually held on whether India's numbers can be trusted.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's oil imports and energy security: the Russian-crude question
India imports roughly 88% of the crude oil it consumes, and since 2022 discounted Russian barrels have supplied about a third of that — a share that, on ship-tracking data, rose to a record in June 2026. Around it sit three pressures: US sanctions on Russia's largest oil companies (in force since November 2025), a US-India trade framework in February 2026 that removed a Russian-oil-linked tariff, and a Strait-of-Hormuz supply disruption tied to the war with Iran. India's stated position, held consistently by the oil ministry and the foreign ministry, is that energy security for 1.4 billion people and market economics — not any external permission — set its sourcing. This is the maintained topic brief on where that stands.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
Reservation and the caste census: India's affirmative-action ledger reopens
India's reservation system sets aside 15% of 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-set ceiling of 50% that the EWS quota has already breached. The long-standing gap in this system is data: India has not counted caste beyond SC and ST since 1931. In April 2025 the Union Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs decided to enumerate caste in the forthcoming census, and the census gazette was notified in June 2025 with a reference date of 1 March 2027 and caste to be recorded in the second, population-enumeration phase. State-level surveys in Bihar and Telangana have meanwhile produced caste counts and, in Bihar's case, an attempt to raise reservation to 65% that the Patna High Court struck down. This brief tracks the policy, the numbers and the range of positions actually held.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's rural welfare architecture: MGNREGA and rural housing
Two programmes dominate India's rural welfare state and the Ministry of Rural Development's budget: MGNREGA, the world's largest legal wage-employment guarantee, and PMAY-Gramin, the rural housing scheme. As of 2026, MGNREGA's headline outlay is held at Rs 86,000 crore, unchanged from 2024-25 even as prices rose; a parliamentary committee has recommended optional rather than mandatory Aadhaar payments and more guaranteed workdays; and the courts have ordered the scheme's resumption in West Bengal after a multi-year federal standoff, though reporting indicates implementation stayed stalled on the ground. PMAY-G, by contrast, was expanded in 2024 with a fresh target of 2 crore additional houses and a large budget increase for 2025-26. This brief tracks what the architecture is, what the numbers actually show, and where the contest lies.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's telecom sector: 5G rollout, BSNL's revival, and spectrum
India runs one of the world's largest and cheapest mobile markets, and by early 2026 its 5G network reached almost every district. The open questions are no longer coverage but monetisation, the delayed revival of the state operator BSNL, and how a new Telecommunications Act reshapes licensing and spectrum. This is the maintained topic brief on where India's telecom sector stands and the positions actually held by government, regulator and operators.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's urbanisation: the Smart Cities Mission and metro rail
India's national urban push runs on two headline programmes steered by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs: the Smart Cities Mission, launched in 2015 for 100 cities and formally closed on 31 March 2025 with the ministry reporting more than 90% of roughly 8,000 projects complete; and a metro-rail build-out that has taken the operational network past 1,000 km across more than two dozen cities, the third-largest such network in the world. The facts of expansion are broadly agreed. What is contested is interpretation — how many of the 100 cities actually finished, whether special-purpose vehicles bypassed elected municipal government, and whether metro ridership justifies the capital cost. This is the maintained topic brief on where that stands as of 2026-07-06.