Category Insights

India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman mentioned the word ‘green’ about two dozen times in her 2023 Budget speech. Several sectors and activities were prefixed with this word, including energy, farming, mobility, buildings, fuel, jobs, hydrogen, and credit. This has to be a first for the country. Other words that were uttered included climate, zero-carbon, organic, wetlands, biological diversity, and environment. Given that nearly all these words were absent in the 2022 Budget speech, this would seem like a definite advance. 

While we are all proud of India's democracy, few of us actually bother to fund any political party. We are content to let parties fund themselves by mobilizing funds as they traditionally have from the time of the freedom struggle, when industrialists like G D Birla used to fund the Congress. But most such funding was informal, with no structured, transparent disclosure of who funded which party to what extent.
Citizenship has evolved from the city-states of ancient Greece and perhaps from the republics or ganas of ancient India to finally emerge as the cornerstone of representative democracy in the twentieth century. Today the idea of citizenship is undergoing several transformations. Mindful of its long history, we need to ensure that our re-imaginations help us escape the past and embrace new futures.