Analysis
Briefs
88 briefs · page 7 of 8
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's water mission: the Jal Jeevan Mission and river management
72 crore rural households (about 81%) with tap connections by October 2025, and river management — Ganga clean-up under Namami Gange, inter-state dispute adjudication, and the Ken-Betwa interlinking project whose foundation stone was laid in December 2024.
- 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.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-06
India's women's reservation law and the wait for delimitation
India's women's reservation law — the Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023, branded the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam — reserves one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha, the state assemblies and the Delhi assembly for women, including within the SC and ST quotas.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-05
India's air power: Rafale, the AMCA programme, and the squadron gap
The Indian Air Force fields roughly 29–31 fighter squadrons against a sanctioned strength of 42, a gap that has widened as legacy MiG types retire faster than replacements arrive.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-05
India's digital public infrastructure and data-protection regime: the state of play
India has built population-scale digital public infrastructure — a digital identity, a real-time payments rail and a document layer used by hundreds of millions — and is now, belatedly, building the legal regime meant to govern the data that flows through it.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-05
India's farm policy: MSP, procurement, and the post-2021 settlement
India announces a minimum support price (MSP) on 22 mandated crops, but the guarantee is administrative, not statutory, and the state actually buys only a narrow slice of that output — mostly rice and wheat, mostly from a few states.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-05
India's health system: Ayushman Bharat and pandemic preparedness
India runs the world's largest government health-assurance scheme atop one of the world's lowest levels of public health spending. 5% target, and households still bear close to 40% of health costs out of pocket.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-05
India's internal-security consolidation: the 'Naxal-Mukt Bharat' deadline and the three-theatres doctrine
The Ministry of Home Affairs has organised its internal-security effort around three long-running theatres — Left-Wing Extremism, Jammu & Kashmir terrorism and Northeast insurgency — and set 31 March 2026 as a deadline to eliminate Naxalism nationwide.
- Topic · maintained 2026-07-05
India's NEP 2020 rollout and the fight over who regulates higher education
India's National Education Policy 2020, approved on 29 July 2020, is being rolled out unevenly: school-stage and undergraduate-degree changes have moved fastest, while the promised single higher-education regulator has only reached Parliament as the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025 — introduced in the Lok Sabha on 15 December 2025 and referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee.