How Big Shifts Are Remaking the World
A remarkable feature of the world in the wake of President Trump’s assault on the global trading and security system is the resilience of global interdependence.
Category Gender, Pluralism and Social Inclusion
Analysing impacts of policies to combating air pollution and lives of women in Delhi
Delhi has become a centre of controversy and politics for the continuously rising and persisting levels of high AQI. Rising vehicular emission, industrial expansion, burning of stubble, etc. remains to be the prime suspected reason for this. States keep blaming each other for transmitting it with lesser stricter action against polluters.
Why the Energy Transition Cannot Be Gender Blind
Policies are often described as gender neutral. In reality, they are rarely neutral. Women, men, and different social groups experience policies differently because they do not have equal access to resources, opportunities, or decision-making power. Social norms, unequal asset ownership, unpaid care responsibilities, mobility constraints, access to finance, education, and institutional power all shape how people engage with public programs.
Beyond Access: Gender, Intersectionality, and the Law of Averages in Urban Public Services
Indian cities are often celebrated as engines of growth and opportunity, driven by expanding infrastructure and ambitious urban development projects. However, it can be noticed that access to public spaces and essential services is not experienced uniformly across social groups in such urban dwellings. This article reflects on a research journey that examines gendered inequalities in urban public spaces and services.
Public Spaces, Private Burdens: Women’s Access to Urban Infrastructure in India
Indian urban policy increasingly frames cities as inclusive, liveable, and gender-sensitive. Yet, this narrative collapses under scrutiny. Women’s everyday engagement with cities reveals a fundamental contradiction: while urban infrastructure is publicly funded and collectively justified, its design failures are privately absorbed by women’s bodies, time, safety, and unpaid labour. The Indian city does not merely exclude women incidentally; it is structured around assumptions that systematically marginalize them as legitimate users of public space.
The Uncounted Loss: How Bihar’s Fate Was Sealed Before Polling Day
The Bihar results were out even before polling began: Bihar has lost, whoever the victor in the Assembly elections. With well over one crore women being paid Rs 10,000 crore by the incumbent government, supposedly for self-employment ventures, and promises of future fiscal support for such enterprises, the political economy of state handouts had been entrenched before polling began.
Digital Feminism as Foreign Policy: Building Digital Peace Economies and Advancing Security in Conflict Zones
I’d like to start with few lines from a poem I wrote for women in conflict zones of India, titled
‘Devi in distress’