Despite learning a bitter lesson from Covid-19, our governments, whether at the state or national level, have failed to recognise the importance of ensuring trouble-free access to public health.

The rich build gated communities for themselves, in which they pay for their own private services of security, and 24X7 power and water supply. They lose sight of the needs of people living outside their walls.

Mixing politics with national security in sensitive border regions like Manipur and Ladakh can cost us dearly. China is a rogue state with aggressive designs and well well-advanced in hybrid and conventional conflict with an expanding arsenal of nuclear weapons.

One of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations calls for a reduction in inequality. On that count, India must exert more by making the income tax net wider and ensuring a lower indirect tax burden

Contrast this exchange against the utterly crass and debased rhetoric, both during the election season and otherwise, that India’s political and cultural leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, employ.

The narratives elucidate how historical marginalisation, compounded by contemporary socio-economic inequities, lays fertile ground for the propagation of Naxalite ideology, which promises liberation from caste-based oppression and economic deprivation.

The war clouds just keep getting thicker and darker. And the warmongers have so far outshouted those pleading for peace. The leaders have failed to bring any sanity, let alone ceasefire or peace talks. All this does not bode well for the Indian economy, which has already been struggling with the challenges of inflation, stagnant private investment, high youth unemployment and widening inequality.

This is the inner rottenness of India’s growth story, a self-imposed colonisation of a nation that has lost its standing, never mind the growing GDP.

The significance of American investment is that it plays an important role in transforming India’s industrialization and paving the path to challenge China to become the next-generation supply chain hub.

Why then is Modi sullying the glory of his third term by going to the polls with Arvind Kejriwal possibly barred from campaigning? 

The national mood was well summed up by a cartoon that showed all others in the race locked up, with just the incumbent in the field, and then the question, half in jest: ‘Who is winning?’.

But how does one counter the Swiss-based air-quality monitoring group IQAir which reports that India was the third most polluted country in the world after Bangladesh and Pakistan in 2023 and Delhi was the “most polluted” capital in the world?

Essentially the world is looking for alternate supply chains which began with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and continues even today with growing trade tensions between the two camps.

The largest persecuted groups in recent times have been Tamils (largely Hindus) in Sri Lanka and Rohingyas (largely Muslims) in Myanmar. Why have they been left out from the list of the ones who will be given shelter citizenship here in India under the CAA?

India has only 2 percent of the world’s freshwater supply but 17 percent of the world's population. The present predicament of people in Bengaluru, skipping work to stand in long queues for a bucket of water is a sobering reminder.