Counterview

By Dr P K Gupta*  India’s allied-health professions have long operated in a fragmented landscape of universities, hospitals, State authorities and private institutions, each with its own nomenclature, curriculum and standards. The National Commission for Allied and Healthcare Professions Act, 2021 was meant to correct this by creating a unified national framework for education, professional regulation and institutional recognition. Few dispute the need for such oversight. The real question is whether standardisation is quietly becoming synonymous with longer courses, additional internships and new professional titles—changes that risk masking deeper gaps in clinical training, institutional capacity and affordability.

By Chintan Dave   India’s healthcare AI story is entering a more consequential phase. The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence can read a medical image, summarize a clinical history, flag an unusual insurance claim or help a doctor make sense of complex information. We increasingly know that it can. The harder question is whether India can turn these capabilities into a trusted, governed and scalable part of healthcare delivery for more than a billion people.

Counterview News  As Europe grapples with an unprecedented summer heatwave, the fragility of nuclear power's dependence on water cooling has been laid bare — with 13 French reactors forced offline and similar shutdowns rippling across Hungary, Romania, and beyond. The crisis has prompted a stark warning from Indian power and climate policy analyst Shankar Sharma , who argues that if such failures can occur in Europe's relatively cooler climate, the risks for water-stressed India are orders of magnitude higher.

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak*  On August 24, 2024, the Trump administration announced the initiation of "Operation Economic Outcast." The stated objective of the operation is to fully isolate the Islamic Republic of Iran, along with any country that enables Iran's economic participation in the global system. According to official statements, the policy targets five key sectors: digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping.

  By Atanu Roy*  As India races to become a global digital powerhouse, a quiet crisis is unfolding beneath the surface. The same water that cools the nation's data centres is desperately needed by communities still struggling for a safe drink. The choice isn't between technology and survival—it's about getting the sequencing right. The Fundamental Question Safe drinking water or AI data centres? For policymakers in the developing world, this might sound like a false binary, but it is rapidly becoming one of the defining dilemmas of our time. The two are not truly competing needs—they serve vastly different levels of development. Drinking water is a basic human necessity. Safe water directly affects survival, public health, education, and productivity. According to the World Health Organization, as recently as 2024, approximately 2.1 billion people still lacked safely managed drinking-water services, with low-income countries facing particularly severe gaps. Unsafe water con...

By Ravi Ranjan*  Raghuvir Sahay’s poem "Against Suicide" (Ātmahatyā ke viruddha) resists easy categorization. It is not merely a political protest, nor simply an existential cry. It is, more precisely, a work of poetic sociology—an attempt to read the hidden human textures of Indian democracy through the compressed, sensuous language of poetry. Where sociology dissects institutions, poetry restores the feeling of what it means to live inside them. Sahay does both. He examines the academy, the hospital, the newspaper, the university, and the political platform not as abstract structures, but as living mechanisms that slowly erase the very citizens they claim to serve.