Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to celebrate Diwali with security personnel at the CoBRA Operations Base in Karanpur, Bastar, Chhattisgarh, was much more than a symbolic gesture of solidarity with the men and women guarding the nation. It carried a larger national security message: while India may have turned a decisive corner in its decades-long…
Why a better inequality score is encouraging, but not the complete economic picture India’s reported Gini Index score of 23 has attracted considerable attention, placing the country among the more equal societies in the world according to the World Bank’s latest available data for 2023. It is an encouraging indicator, particularly for a country of…
India’s refining capabilities are attracting renewed international attention, with the country’s sophisticated oil-processing infrastructure emerging as a strategic asset amid shifting global energy supplies. The spotlight is now on Gujarat’s Jamnagar refinery complex, whose technological capabilities could help India process some of the world’s most difficult crude grades, including Venezuela’s heavy, sulphur-rich oil. US Secretary…
Every time Bharat’s economy demonstrates resilience, a familiar chorus of doomsday predictions seems to emerge. From former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram to US President Donald Trump, pessimistic assessments of the Indian economy have periodically made headlines. The latest alarm is even more dramatic: India’s foreign exchange reserves are…
Nearly a thousand years ago, a medical prescription originating in India travelled thousands of kilometres across the Silk Road into Central Asia, carrying with it more than a medicinal formula. It carried a fragment of India’s rich medical heritage, preserved in a language that would eventually help modern scholars unlock a centuries-old mystery in the…
In March 1890, a British lieutenant riding across Chinese Turkestan on a secret mission to track a killer was handed a bundle of brittle birch bark by a local digger. He paid for it, rolled it up, and sent it to Calcutta, unaware that he had stumbled upon what was then regarded as the oldest…
Shekhar Maramraju In the modern hyper-connected era, internet folklore has an uncanny ability to morph into widely accepted alternative reality. Few subjects demonstrate this phenomenon better than the legend of the TR-3B “Black Manta”—a persistent aerospace rumour and unverified conspiracy theory that completely lacks official military proof, documentation, or physical evidence. The myth recently saw…
India’s recent patenting of BAM-H24, a boron-rich energetic compound developed by scientists associated with ACRHEM, now DIA-CoE, at the University of Hyderabad under DRDO, has understandably attracted attention. But the significance of the development lies not in the broad claim that India has “cracked boron rocket fuel”, but in something more specific: an Indian team…
The drone never reached Mecca. The message did. On September 15, Saudi Arabia said its air defences intercepted and destroyed a Houthi drone south of Mecca before it entered the holy city’s restricted airspace. The Houthis denied that they had targeted Mecca. Yet the incident immediately became a powerful geopolitical story because the mere possibility…
For decades, Bharat was conditioned to believe that certain technologies were simply beyond its reach. High-end precision manufacturing was one of them. Whenever the country aspired to build sophisticated machines, the conventional wisdom was predictable: Why take the risk when Germany, Japan, or other advanced manufacturing nations could supply them? The result was not merely…
