India’s once-explosive app economy is entering a difficult transition phase marked by slowing growth, rising fraud, declining advertising efficiency, and mounting pressure on app companies to prove profitability rather than simply chase downloads.
When 65-year-old Jitu Munda walked into the Odisha Gramin Bank ’s Malliposhi branch on the afternoon of April 27, carrying a jute sack on his shoulder, no one expected what lay inside. The sack contained the skeletal remains of his sister, Kalra Munda, whom he had buried on January 26.
After I was transferred as the Times of India representative in Gandhinagar, the Gujarat capital, in 1997, one of the many changes I noticed in my interaction with state officialdom and politicians was the kind of courtesies extended to me—even by those I would rarely meet. One such courtesy came in the form of a phrase I knew nothing about: Micchami Dukkadam .
Author and legal commentator Gajanan Khergamker has made his ebook '10/3: Exile, Empire And War In The Andamans' publicly accessible online, a month after its limited offline digital launch on 10 March 2026. What began as a publication has, in Khergamker's own framing, transformed into a live, evolving research framework — Project 10/3 — inviting participation from researchers, institutions and citizens.
A recent opinion piece published in The Quint by Subhash Chandra Garg has raised questions over the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Atanu Chakraborty from HDFC Bank , with Garg stating that the exit “raises doubts about his own ‘ethics’.” Garg, currently Chief Policy Advisor at Subhanjali and former Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, Government of India, writes that the Reserve Bank of India ( RBI ) appears to find no substance in Chakraborty’s claims, noting, “It is clear the RBI sees no merit in Atanu Chakraborty’s wild and vague assertions.”
I was a little amused by the abrupt March 17 resignation of Atanu Chakraborty—a Gujarat cadre IAS officer of the 1985 batch who retired in 2020—as chairman of HDFC Bank. Much of what may have led to his decision to quit this ostensibly high post—actually a non-executive, part-time role—is by now well known. I followed most of it online with considerable interest, partly because I had interacted with him umpteen times during my stint as The Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar from 1997 to 2012.
A few week ago, I was forwarded an article that appeared in the British weekly The Economist . Titled “Caste and cuisine: From honeycomb curry to blood fry: India’s ‘untouchable’ cooking”, it took me back to what I had blogged about what was called a “ sattvik food festival”, an annual event organised by former Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad professor Anil Gupta.
The other day, a discussion broke out among ten friends on love marriages—a contentious issue in Gujarat following moves in the corridors of power to regulate them by making parental consent mandatory. One of us claimed that, unlike in the past, nearly 70 percent of weddings today are love marriages. Another person, who had eloped to get married years ago, remarked, “Problems exist everywhere, whether it is a love marriage or an arranged one.”
This should sound almost hilarious. Not only did Subhas Chandra Bose not die in a plane crash in Taipei, nor was he the mysterious Gumnami Baba who reportedly passed away on 16 September 1985 in Ayodhya, but we are now told that he actually died in 1975—date unknown—“in oblivion” somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Which city? Moscow? No one seems to know.
A consensus statement authored by a distinguished group of twenty-eight public health and nutrition experts, including Arun Gupta , Chandrakant Lahariya, and Banshi Saboo, underscores a critical public health crisis in India where non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular illnesses now contribute to roughly 60% of annual deaths.
It is always sad when a journalist colleague passes away — more so when that person has remained firm in his journalistic moorings. Compared to many others, I did not know R.K. Misra, who passed away on February 23 after a long illness, very intimately, but we interacted occasionally over the years.
The first page image of the paper "Corona Virus Killed by Sound Vibrations Produced by Thali or Ghanti: A Potential Hypothesis" published in the Journal of Molecular Pharmaceuticals and Regulatory Affairs , Vol. 2, Issue 2 (2020), has gone viral on social media in the wake of the controversy surrounding a Chinese robot presented by the Galgotias University as its original product at the just-concluded AI summit in Delhi . The resurfacing of the 2020 publication, authored by Dharmendra Kumar , Galgotias University, has reignited debate over academic standards and scientific credibility.
I am compelled to refer to a blog by communications expert Tushar Panchal titled "The Grip, the Choke, and the Follow-Through." Forwarded to me by a friend, it calls Rahul Gandhi's Parliament intervention on February 11, 2026, the "most strategically constructed speech of his parliamentary career."
A new study titled “From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Engineering Fuels the Epidemic of Preventable Disease”, published in The Milbank Quarterly , warns that ultraprocessed foods are deliberately engineered in ways similar to cigarettes and should be treated as a major public health threat rather than as ordinary food products.
India’s once-unstoppable residential real estate rally has hit a significant roadblock, as new data reveals that housing sales in 2025 plummeted to their lowest levels since 2022. According to the Real Insight: Residential CY 2025 report by PropTiger.com , the sector is grappling with a cooling demand cycle that has seen annual sales tank by 12%, dropping to 3,86,365 units from the high of 4,36,992 units recorded just a year prior.
The other day, I visited what is being billed as the Ahmedabad International Flower Show 2026 , currently underway at the Sabarmati Riverfront Event Centre . This was my second visit to the Ahmedabad flower show. I went with my NRI friends, who remarked that the display this year was far superior to what they had seen when they visited Ahmedabad around the same time last year.
India must confront its accelerating ecological emergency with systemic reforms rather than symbolic gestures, climate and energy expert Soumya Dutta warned during an interactive workshop in Ahmedabad titled “India’s Environmental Crisis: Where Do We Go From Here Living?”. Introduced by Jesuit activist Cedric Prakash as both a scientist and people’s movement organiser, Dutta said India was already facing life-threatening consequences of environmental neglect.
In a recent in-depth podcast discussion, a leading public policy scholar issued a stark critique of India's evolving governance landscape, arguing that the growing reliance on public-private partnerships has fundamentally weakened civil society’s ability to hold power to account and advocate for equitable public policy.
Central India’s Upper Ken Basin , where the ancient Bundelkhand Craton meets the younger Vindhyan sedimentary rocks , appears at first glance to be a quiet and time-worn landscape. But new research reveals that the region is still being actively shaped by deep, hidden tectonic forces. In a recent study, geographers Kundan Parmar and Satheesh Chothodi used high-resolution elevation data and underground gravity measurements to decode the subtle fingerprints of active deformation imprinted onto the basin’s rivers and valleys.
I first came in contact with Himmat Shah in the second half of the 1970s during one of my routine visits to Ahmedabad , my maternal hometown. I do not recall the exact year, but at that time I was working in Delhi with the CPI -owned People’s Publishing House (PPH) as its assistant editor, editing books and writing occasional articles for small periodicals. Himmatbhai — as I would call him — worked at the People’s Book House (PBH), the CPI’s bookshop on Relief Road in Ahmedabad.