Themes

Caste and Reservation in India

Caste and reservation is the constitutional machinery through which India reserves a share of public jobs, university seats and legislative constituencies for historically disadvantaged groups. At the central level it sets aside 15% for Scheduled Castes, 7.5% for Scheduled Tribes, 27% for Other Backward Classes and, since 2019, 10% for economically weaker sections, all measured against a Supreme Court ceiling of 50% that the EWS quota has already crossed. The system runs on categories the state defines, commissions that maintain the lists, and courts that police the limits — but its central gap is data: India has not counted caste beyond SC and ST since 1931, and the decision to enumerate it in the 2027 census reopens the whole ledger.

India–China Relations

India and China are Asia's two civilisational powers and nuclear-armed neighbours whose 3,488 km disputed Himalayan boundary — the Line of Actual Control — has never been formally demarcated. The relationship swings between deep economic interdependence and recurring military standoffs, most gravely the 2020 Galwan Valley clash, the first deadly border fighting in 45 years.

India's Demographics

India's demographics are the structural backdrop to almost every policy debate: the country is the world's most populous, its fertility has fallen below the replacement level, and it holds a large working-age majority that gives it a time-limited "demographic dividend". This is also a data story. The instruments that measure the population — the decennial census, the Sample Registration System, the National Family Health Survey and the labour-force surveys — are run by different arms of the state, and no census had been completed since 2011 until Census 2027 began its house-listing phase in 2026. The size, age and movement of the population set the electorate, the workforce, the welfare bill and the allocation of parliamentary seats.

India's Human Development

India's human development is the composite of its health, education and living-standard outcomes — how long people live, how much they learn, and whether they escape deprivation — measured by a spread of official and independent instruments that often disagree. As of 2026 the picture is one of broad, uneven improvement: literacy near 81%, multidimensional poverty roughly two-fifths of its 2013-14 level, an HDI of 0.685 that still ranks 130th of 193 countries, and stubbornly high child stunting and anaemia. It is a system as much about who counts what as about the numbers themselves.

India's Informal Economy

India's informal economy is the roughly nine-tenths of the workforce that earns a living outside formal, regular, salaried employment: the self-employed, casual labourers, unregistered micro-enterprises and, more recently, app-based gig and platform workers. It is not a fringe but the default condition of Indian work, and the state now approaches it as a measurement problem (counting it through the Periodic Labour Force Survey), a coverage problem (extending social security to the uncovered through registries like e-Shram) and a formalisation problem (drawing informal firms and workers into the tax, credit and benefit net through portals like Udyam).

India's Jobs and Labour Market

India's jobs and labour market is the system that determines who works, on what terms, and how the state counts it. Its defining features are a very large informal workforce, self-employment as the single biggest category of work, and a female labour-force participation rate that is low by world standards but rose sharply in official surveys after 2017-18. The measurement itself is the arena: the Periodic Labour Force Survey, run by the National Statistical Office, sets the headline numbers, and the central argument of Indian economic policy — often called the "jobless growth" debate — is whether fast GDP growth is producing enough regular, paid, formal jobs, or mostly low-paid self-employment and unpaid family work.

India's Semiconductor Strategy

India is attempting to build a domestic semiconductor industry — from chip fabrication to assembly and design — as a matter of both economic ambition and strategic autonomy. Anchored by the India Semiconductor Mission and large state incentives, the push aims to reduce dependence on imported chips and to position India within friendly supply chains.

India's Strategic Autonomy

Strategic autonomy is the organising principle of Indian foreign policy: the insistence on independent decision-making, unbound by formal alliances, so that India can partner with rival powers simultaneously and on its own terms. It is the post-Cold-War evolution of Non-Alignment into what is often called "multi-alignment" — deepening ties with the United States while retaining Russia, and engaging China inside BRICS and the SCO even amid rivalry.

India's Urbanisation and Migration

India's urbanisation and migration is the structural transition of people out of agriculture and villages into towns, cities and non-farm work — measured by the Census, the Periodic Labour Force Survey and municipal data, and governed through a fragmented set of institutions rather than a single authority. As of 2026 the last complete Census is still 2011, when 31.16% of Indians lived in urban areas and about 45.36 crore (37% of the population) were internal migrants by place of last residence. The defining feature of the system is a gap: city populations and informal settlements grow faster than the finances, legal rights and data that are meant to serve them, and the workers who move to build the cities remain largely uncounted and outside city welfare.

India's Welfare State

India's welfare state is the machinery of direct benefit transfer, subsidies, the public distribution system and cash schemes through which the Union and state governments move money and grain to hundreds of millions of citizens. Its distinctive feature since the 2010s is the JAM trinity — Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar biometric identity and mobile phones — which the government uses to route benefits directly into accounts, bypassing intermediaries. It is a structural pillar of the state because it carries a large recurring share of public spending, decides who counts as a beneficiary, and is the arena where questions of targeting, exclusion and privacy are fought out.

Religion and the Law in India

Religion and the Law is the constitutional settlement that makes India a secular state while leaving family life to religion-specific codes. The Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and religion under Articles 25-28, protects minority institutions under Articles 29-30, and lists a Uniform Civil Code as an unenforced directive under Article 44 — yet marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption are still governed by separate Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Parsi personal laws. The live legal fronts run through the courts and Parliament: the Places of Worship Act that freezes the religious character of shrines as on 15 August 1947, the 2025 overhaul of waqf-property law, and the Uniform Civil Code question that Uttarakhand has now answered for one state.