Microfinance, the practice of lending to groups of vulnerable women without collateral, continues to dominate India’s financial news. Sizable new investments in the sector come from both domestic and global capital sources.

In 1998, Japan vehemently criticized India’s nuclear tests and imposed tough economic sanctions. Though India and Japan established diplomatic relations in 1952, the relations had picked up only in the post-Cold War era and these Indian nuclear tests hit the fledgling relations very badly. Since then, much water has flowed down the Ganga and the bilateral relations soon picked up after then-Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori’s landmark visit to India in 2000. 

New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is renowned for the quality and popularity of its medical services. Interestingly, the hospital has also served as an important testbed for many of India’s digital health initiatives. It was among the first to adopt the National Informatics Center’s e-Hospital system, a cloud-based hospital management information system. In 2016, the hospital announced free registration for patients who furnish their Aadhaar ID.

One of the early moves of the present Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-led Tamil Nadu government, which came to power in May 2021, was to jettison the phrase “Central Government” in official communications. Tamil Nadu’s decision to address the Government of India as the Union Government (Ondriya Arasu) instead of the Central Government (Mathiya Arasu) was avowedly directed at halting the growing attrition of Indian federalism.

Over the last decade, welfare programs in India have proliferated with a particular eye to making delivery more efficient. This essentially means that politicians seek to improve last-mile delivery by using technology-enabled solutions that reduce leakages, discretion, and favoritism.

The Indian public believes corruption among public officials to be endemic and an indictment of the state’s failures of transparency. Against this backdrop, there is nothing exceptional about the recurrent accusations of corruption against the Tobacco Board, the state regulatory authority that mediates auctions for cigarette tobacco in India. During my fieldwork on Board-regulated auction floors in Andhra Pradesh in 2016, such accusations were frequently used by both private-sector tobacco traders and tobacco farmers to question state actions in the markets.

In early December 2022, the Lok Sabha and RS voted to grant the Narikuravar (with a proposed name change to Narikoravan) and Kuruvikkaran communities Scheduled Tribe (ST) status. The bill, which received the assent of the President on January 2, 2023, has been declared a victory by the Narikuravar community, who stated that “this is the first time our request has been officially approved by the Indian government and passed both houses of Parliament. We are thankful to the politicians who engaged in this matter.