Launched by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs on June 1, 2020, as part of the “Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan” Pradhan Mantri Street Vendor’s Atmanirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) aimed at empowering and improving the economic conditions of the street vendors that were adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for this scheme arises as India’s street vendor forms an integral part of the urban economy.
Tonnage tax schemes, a unique form of taxation primarily found in the maritime industry, provide shipowners and operators with an alternative to traditional corporate taxation. Instead of taxing profits, these schemes assess taxes based on a fixed rate per net ton of a vessel. This approach, unique to the maritime sector, aims to establish a more predictable and stable taxation structure, thereby promoting investment and competitiveness.
The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) is responsible for coordinating skill development efforts across India, bridging the gap between industry demands and workforce supply
The panel discussion on IMPRI’s 6th Annual Series of Thematic Deliberations and Analysis of Budget 2025-2026 on Cities, Local Governance, and the Union Budget 2025-26. Organized by the Center for Habitat, Urban and Regional Studies (CHURS) at the IMPR, Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi.
Economic self-sufficiency is crucial for women’s emancipation because it fundamentally enables autonomy, freedom, and the empowerment necessary to make decisions. It also allows women to live beyond the limits imposed by patriarchal norms.
Equality in the workplace, along with the recognition and enforcement of women’s property rights, are vital instruments for ensuring women’s economic and financial independence.
Indian federalism, multilevel in its functioning, is based normatively on the principle of subsidiarity, which essentially means that the authority needs to be invested at the lowest possible level of institutional hierarchy. The subsidiarity principle seeks decentralisation and asserts, to deepen democracy, that the local levels, in relation to the central governments, must be ensured with some degree of functional independence and agency. The architecture of power distribution in the Indian Constitution indicates, more in spirit than in letter, that power must travel from Rajpath (the ruler’s site) to Janpath (where common people tread), down to gram sabhas, which is the real repository of people’s power.
Since 2014, under Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s socio-political discourse has shifted to the right, driven by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS’s) ideology. The unprecedented moves like the triple talaq ban, Article 370 revocation, Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizens (CAA-NRC) legislation, and the Ram Janmabhoomi project reflect this shift, enabled by capturing institutions, media, judiciary, and public imagination.
Moving beyond its established role as a socio-political-cultural ideology with core philosophy of othering of those not belonging to the wider Hindu fold, Hindutva’s new phase is now possibly shaping cities and the urban lived environment, as a site for demonstrating ideology – socially, culturally and spatially. The targeted demolition of homes of Muslims as an act of collective punishment, and the recent cases of staged violence including at Sambhal mosque are only facets of a broader, emerging urban manifestation of the Hindutva ideology.