A momentous task awaits Prime Minister, Narendra Modi and the newly elected Prime Minister of Nepal, Sher Bahadur Deuba. The two prime ministers have to maintain the momentum of the India-Nepal relationship (revived by former Prime Minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal) and alleviate the bitterness that had crept in during Dahal’s predecessor, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli’s term. While several reasons can be cited for the plummeting of India-Nepal ties during Oli’s tenure, his accusation of India initiating an economic blockade against Nepal is noteworthy.

The “habitat” of the Western Ghats is constructed of particular landforms—ridge and valley, peak and plateau, escarpment, and plains. Today, these features are at the heart of the development-environment conflict that has escalated since the 2012 UNESCO designation of the Ghats as a World Heritage Site. The use of this language of landforms can be traced back to colonial texts; but the roots of the image behind it are more difficult to unravel, being embedded in visual articulations of geographic maps and object drawings.

The results of the five recently concluded elections to the state assemblies—Uttar Pradesh (UP), Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa, and Manipur—this past March, the by-elections to ten assembly constituencies across states, and the municipal elections in Delhi in April, in which the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has done very well, have important implications.

Every year, from June through the end of September, the summer monsoon rains sweep up from India’s southern coasts and gradually spread to the north, supplying 80 percent of India’s annual rainfall. Rivers flow, fields are sown, and aquifers and reservoirs get replenished, setting in motion a burst of agricultural activity after the scorching summer heat. Underlying this euphoria, however, lies a deeply stressed agricultural system.

Cities are increasingly seen as sites of strategic action on clean energy and climate change. The United Nation’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals includes an explicit urban goal for the first time, and the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement enables new spaces to promote climate outcomes in national development contexts. The attention on cities in the energy-climate nexus is particularly timely for India, which is projected to account for a quarter of the rise in global energy use by 2040. This growth is driven in large part by the country’s ongoing economic and social transitions.

India needs its roads. Our road network is essential to the free flow of goods and people across the country and connects rural villages to the rest of the nation. India’s roads, together with the railways, make us one. The question that should be asked, however, is how many roads does India need? It is obvious that there is an upper limit to the area that any nation can allocate to its road network. Aside from the fact that building roads is expensive, the opportunity cost must also be considered; the land given over to building a road can now no longer be used for other purposes.