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Environmental clearance: A legal safeguard, not an administrative hurdle

By Raj Kumar Sinha* For decades, India has grappled with the challenge of balancing development with environmental protection. Large projects—including roads, dams, mining operations, thermal power plants, industrial projects and nuclear power plants—are often presented as essential drivers of economic growth. Yet before such projects are undertaken, environmental impact assessments and measures to prevent or minimise potential harm are not merely desirable; they are legal requirements.

Rights group criticises probe linked to TISS event honouring G.N. Saibaba

By A Representative The human rights coalition Campaign Against State Repression (CASR) issued a statement on 15 August 2026 strongly condemning a Mumbai Police investigation into students, former students and professors of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences linked to an October 2025 programme commemorating the late professor G.N. Saibaba . The group said the arrest of a former TISS student, notices issued to professors over their communications with students, and scrutiny of routine academic fieldwork form a disturbing pattern of placing academic spaces, political expression and reading material under police surveillance.

Independence, history and the politics of national memory

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* August 15 is an extremely important day in world history, not only because it marks India's independence, but also because it is associated with the end of the Second World War in Asia. On August 15, 1945, Japan announced its surrender to the Allied powers, bringing the war in the Pacific to an end, although the formal surrender was signed on September 2. By then, American forces had established a decisive military position in the Pacific and the Soviet Union had entered the war against Japan. A different outcome in 1945 could have profoundly altered the history of the Indian subcontinent.

Viksit Bharat 2047: Does India have the capabilities to get there?

By Chintan Dave Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day address should be read less as a catalogue of announcements than as an invitation to examine India’s next development challenge. That challenge is capability.

The politics of dominance: Revisiting a Hindi classic on India’s freedom movement

By Bharat Dogra Bhagwati Charan Verma (1903–81) achieved enduring fame for his philosophical novel Chitralekha , which is still widely read and was twice made into popular films. The latter version starred Meena Kumari and Ashok Kumar and featured some memorable songs written by Sahir Ludhianvi. However, here I would like to discuss a less-remembered book by this author because of the abiding—in fact, increasing—relevance of some important issues it raises. I am referring to the novel Tedhe-Medhe Raaste (roughly translated as The Curved Paths of Life).

The dangerous burden of being a black pioneer in British academia

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak* Professor Jason Arday died on 4 August 2026, aged 41, in a flat in Battersea, London . But in a profound sense, he had been “killed” long before his physical death: reduced to the label of a Black professor and subjected to a relentless, coordinated campaign of institutional scrutiny and public hostility.