Air pollution has become as much a part of North Indian winters as weddings and festivals. The average levels of particulate air pollution over November 2024 in India’s capital city of Delhi crossed 250 µg/m³, a number so high as to be almost uninformative. The WHO standard for safe air is set at 5 µg/m³, and India’s own air quality standard sits at 40 µg/m³.
About the Seminar:
Lubaina Rangwala is Program Head, Urban Development & Resilience with the Sustainable Cities and Transport team at World Resources Institute (WRI), India. She is an Urban Planner and Architect from Mumbai, with over 18 years of work experience in India and the US. Her current work involves operationalizing sub-national climate action plans and heat and flood resilience measures in Indian cities.
Jahnavi Phalkey is the Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru, a public space for research-based engagement across the human, social, and natural sciences. She is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India (Permanent Black, 2013) and has co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016). She is the producer-director of the 2020 documentary Cyclotron and was awarded the 2023 Infosys Prize in Humanities.
Toward the end of India’s Near East: A New History (Hurst, 2024), Avinash Paliwal noted that India’s “over-investment” in Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina could lead to trouble, given her growing unpopularity.
The ability of a country to raise capital in the financial markets is linked to its perceived creditworthiness and is a critical but underexplored theme determining its economic and social prospects. Investors typically rely on credit ratings to determine a country’s credit worthiness. If a country’s credit rating is lower than its credit fundamentals, as we argue to be the case for India, it invariably leads to higher borrowing costs, leaving less fiscal space for public spending on areas such as health, education, infrastructure, and climate resilience.
Do Muslims need to be represented only by Muslims? This provocative question is usually overlooked to make a few sweeping generalizations about ever-declining numbers of Muslim MPs and MLAs in legislative bodies. Popular journalistic writing on this subject tends to focus entirely on the exact number of Muslim legislators to highlight the political marginalization of Muslims in India.
What does the continued large-scale fighting in the Myanmar civil war mean for India? The violence in Myanmar began when the military forcibly took over power in February 2021, deposing the elected government. In response, three major ethnic armed groups united to form the Three Brotherhood Alliance (TBA)—the Arakan Army (AA), the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA)—which then launched a concerted offensive against the junta forces.
