Coverage
Themes
Maintained dossiers on the relationships and domains that cut across ministries — the China boundary, caste, demography, work, cities, energy and autonomy.
11 maintained dossiers, each carrying a timeline from 1947 or its founding, its sources tiered by provenance, and the questions readers ask about it answered on the page.
A theme is what does not fit inside one ministry. The boundary with China is worked at once by the Ministry of External Affairs, the Army, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and the Ministry of Home Affairs. Caste and reservation run through education, employment, the enumeration machinery and the courts. Urbanisation is largely a state subject with Union money attached to it. Filing any of these under a single department would hide the part that matters, which is the seam between departments.
So each of these gets its own entity, with its own timeline, its own sources and links out to every institution that touches it. A theme dossier is the place to start when the question is about a relationship rather than about an office.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.