Over the last thirty years, the Indian state has done a remarkable job ensuring its citizens have access to education. Beginning with state-level policies such as the Andhra Pradesh Primary Education Programme and Shiksha Karmi in Rajasthan in 1984 and 1987 respectively, and culminating in the Right to Education Act at the Centre in 2009, the legislative and programmatic attention to education has been tremendous. And with that, there has been a genuine expansion in access and provision at the primary level.

On October 7, 2014, India’s aspirations of becoming a global leader in the manufacture and operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs; commonly known as drones) for civilian use were seemingly crushed overnight. The Directorate General for Civil Aviation (DGCA), India’s civil aviation regulator, issued a short public notice that prohibited any non-governmental entity in India from launching UAVs for any purpose whatsoever due to safety and security issues until regulations were issued.

“The Afghan Government’s willingness for peace is despite the fact that armed groups have identified themselves and demonstrated to all of us that they are the irreconcilables,” said India’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Syed Akbaruddin, at a Security Council meeting in March 2018. Despite its aversion to a similar outreach in 2015, when it viewed Ghani to be tilting towards Islamabad, India called the international community to support the 2018 outreach.

We live in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) that has provided us with immense processing power, storage capacity, and access to information. The exponential development of technology gave us the spinning wheel in the first, electricity in the second, and computers in the third industrial revolution. In 2016, the World Economic Forum called AI “the fourth industrial revolution” that has radically transformed the way we live, work, and connect with each other. However, it has also given us regulatory challenges such as data ownership and labor protection. 

After the first metro project in Kolkata, it took two decades for India to plan and execute its second metro rail project in Delhi in 2002. But afterwards, there was a surge in metro rail projects across Indian cities. In the past decade, more than thirteen cities in India have sanctioned for metro rail systems and many more states are still vying to seek clearance from the central government for metro rail projects.