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A comprehensive new report by Homes In The City (HIC), a Bhuj-based civil society organisation, has revealed that despite late monsoon rains easing Kutch's immediate drought conditions, the region faces a deepening water security crisis — with Bhuj having lost more than half of its historic lakes and pastoral communities forced to migrate for the first time since 2018.

Findings from 540+ data leaders and practitioners across 65+ countries show trusted data, business context and governance are lagging behind enterprise AI adoption *** As enterprises race to move artificial intelligence from experimentation into daily operations, the data foundation holding these systems up is emerging as the critical weak link, according to the latest Modern Data Report: 5 Emerging Trends in Enterprise Data & AI , released by The Modern Data Company .

By Rajiv Shah  ​I was recently forwarded a complaint by social activist Jatin Sheth , who leads Abad Amdavad , an Ahmedabad-based civic rights NGO. The organization regularly takes up municipal grievances in a city that aspires to be a cutting-edge metropolis—one eyeing to hold the Commonwealth Games , followed by the Olympics . It is quite another matter that independent international studies have ranked Ahmedabad among the environmentally least resilient when evaluated alongside 72 global cities. ​A few weeks ago, Abad Amdavad submitted a formal representation to civic authorities, arguing that the city’s current infrastructure and administrative apparatus fall far short of what is required to host an event like the 2030 Commonwealth Games, let alone the Olympic Games six years later. Given current ground realities, “the city’s civic condition may embarrass the nation unless urgent, structural reforms are pushed,” Sheth wrote in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi...

  A new dataset released by the German environmental and human rights organisation, Urgewald, has shown that Indian banks cut their coal financing by 19%, from $3.5 billion in 2022 to $2.8 billion in 2025, but cautions that the fall is unlikely to be lasting, because very few Indian banks have adopted coal restrictions. 

A comprehensive new report published in September 2026 reveals that climate change has remained a marginal concern in the Indian Parliament despite the country's growing vulnerability to extreme weather events. The study, titled India's Parliamentary Discourse on Environment since the Paris Agreement , analyzed legislative engagement over the first ten years following the 2015 Paris Agreement .

India's eCommerce app market is growing at a pace unmatched by any other major economy, but new data from AppsFlyer's State of eCommerce for Marketers in India – 2026 Edition reveals a market navigating sharp seasonal swings, shifting platform dynamics, and emerging retention challenges. According to the report, there is a 42% remarketing pullback and a declining Day 30 retention, signalling trouble beneath the surface.

In what has been interpreted as a landmark victory for grassroots environmental justice, the Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO) of the Miraj Sub-Division in Sangli district has ordered the temporary shutdown of the 10 MW Bhumi Green Energy Waste-to-Energy (WTE) incineration plant in Tung village . The administrative action is said to have followed sustained community protests and a damning joint fact-finding report by the Paryavaran Rakshan Samiti Sangli , the National Alliance for Climate and Ecological Justice (NACEJ), and the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA). 

  A new  longitudinal study  by three UK-based psychology and biosocial research scholars has revealed that frequent, non-sexual physical touch from a romantic partner significantly improves long-term metabolic and cardiovascular health in older adults. While the science appears clear, experts warn that for elderly Indian couples, reaping these profound biological benefits requires navigating deep-seated cultural and religious taboos surrounding physical affection and "touch therapy" in later life. 

A recent analysis by the Association for Democratic Reforms reveals that the Bharatiya Janata Party has positioned itself as the primary national destination for post-election political defections, absorbing a total of 29 sitting legislators between 2022 and 2026. Broken down by legislative house, the BJP gained 7 Rajya Sabha Members of Parliament and 22 Members of Legislative Assemblies, accounting for 26 percent of all 111 nationwide party switches. 

A few days ago, while visiting a local library in a relatively small town on the eastern coast of the United States, the person who took me there asked if I wished to borrow a book. I looked around. While I couldn't find much that immediately connected with me, one book seemed of particular interest: Black & Buddhist .

  A new comprehensive report , "The Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR) 2026: Cybercrime – Victim Perspectives and Systemic Responses", published jointly by Common Cause and Lokniti–CSDS, has highlighted deep vulnerabilities among women and historically marginalised groups in India’s expanding cyber domain. The study reveals that two-thirds of women (67%) perceive themselves as likely targets of online crimes due to their gender, with 29% considering themselves "very likely" targets compared to 19% of men. 

  It was the second time I visited a temporary museum in Raleigh, a major city in North Carolina , south of Washington, D.C. The visit was primarily meant to be an educational experience for an eight-year-old girl I happen to know intimately. She displayed an unusual curiosity, but what interested me even more was the manner in which both young and elderly people, high school children and experts, seemed extraordinarily keen to tell children about the insects on display .

  In a deeply reflective conversation on Episode 13 of the Unmute podcast, veteran Dalit rights activist, lawyer, and founder of Navsarjan , Martin Macwan , dissected the anatomy of social resistance, the pervasive nature of caste , and the future of human rights movements in India. 

For nearly a decade, the database at Land Conflict Watch has carried a certain bleakness. It is a cold, hard accounting of the costs of resource extraction, the toll “development” takes on the most vulnerable, and the ugly consequences of unchecked private consumption. Within this grim arithmetic of over 1,095 mapped land conflicts, one statistic stands out: nearly 80% of these disputes occur over common lands . 

Persistent caste discrimination , the marginalisation of Dalits , concerns over the rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples , and the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities are among the issues flagged by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in its latest observations on India.

  The advocacy group Nutrition Advocacy for Public Interest (NAPi) has rejected as inadequate and evasive the response it received from the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) to its August demand for a ban on junk food advertising , saying the government's reply sidesteps every substantive demand raised by the country's leading doctors and public health experts.

  The other day, I was talking with a non-resident Indian (NRI) in a middle-level city off the eastern coast of the United States. The tête-à-tête took place as we were returning from a religious ceremony at a well-established Hindu temple, where several hundred NRIs had participated, many of them actively.

The latest update to Equality Now's flagship Words & Deeds report reveals that women's and girls' rights globally are facing a "strategic and coordinated rollback," with hard-won legal protections being weakened or deliberately undermined, though the report stresses this backlash is neither inevitable nor irreversible .

  A comprehensive new study from the Capgemini Research Institute paints a troubling picture of corporate climate readiness, revealing that while executives increasingly recognize climate change as a material business threat, most organizations lack the fundamental capabilities to measure, manage, and adapt to its impacts.

A new academic study has drawn fresh attention to Sankalp Bhoomi, a modest memorial site in Vadodara's Sayaji Baug, arguing that the spot where B.R. Ambedkar spent five difficult hours in 1917 has quietly grown into one of Gujarat's most significant sites of Dalit political and cultural assertion.

  Following my blog on why the Eiffel Tower authorities should take all the blame for giving in to the Swaminarayan sadhus ’ bizarre demand to “invisibilise” women, including its female staff, during their visit to the internationally renowned Paris tourist centre on September 5, an interesting comment by one of the top academics drew my attention to something I vaguely knew about one of India’s most powerful and richest religious sects.

  The Earth is approaching a series of irreversible environmental thresholds that threaten the stability of life on the planet, but a landmark new study argues that the same systems science that predicts catastrophe also offers a blueprint for rapid, self-propelling recovery. 

  A scathing independent citizens' inquiry has concluded that the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada river, one of India's most ambitious multipurpose dams, has systematically violated the legal and human rights of tens of thousands of displaced families while overstating its economic benefits and understating its ecological costs.

 In a detailed interview published by The Examination on September 10, 2026, food policy expert Marion Nestle discusses her new book Sugar Coated (co-authored with Lisa Sutherland, a former Kellogg vice president of nutrition). The book traces how cereal makers transformed a niche product into a breakfast staple through marketing, industry-funded research, lobbying, and regulatory outmaneuvering.

The devastating flood that swept through  Nepal 's Rasuwa district on August 26, 2026, was likely triggered by climate change , but the scale of the tragedy was determined by human decisions — including the unchecked proliferation of hydropower projects in a fragile Himalayan landscape, according to Himanshu Thakkar , coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP).

   On the eve of the 18th BRICS Summit, a new report has accused the New Development Bank (NDB) — the multilateral lender set up by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — of failing to deliver on its founding promise of people-centric, sustainable development, even as the harms from its projects mount and affected communities are left with no way to seek redress.

A citizens’ audit of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Y Block, Mangolpuri, has challenged the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer’s defence of deletions from the draft electoral roll, alleging that in four of six cited cases the official explanation rests on “an unrecorded, unnamed ‘local inquiry’ or oral statement” rather than documented evidence. The detailed response follows a four-hour public hearing on 5 September 2026 before a citizens’ jury chaired by Justice (Retd.) Madan B. Lokur, former Judge of the Supreme Court of India.

A people-led audit of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Mangolpuri’s Y-Block has brought renewed scrutiny to the accuracy of Delhi’s draft electoral rolls, with citizen volunteers and civil-society groups reporting cases in which voters allegedly found themselves wrongly classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate, or missing altogether from the draft list.

For generations, the seasonal Anjani River has been more than a waterway for the Patharvat community of Waghlud Khurd. It has been their classroom, their workplace, their temple, and their source of life. But today, the riverbed that once rang with the sound of hammers and chisels has fallen quiet. A centuries-old stone craft is dying—not because the river has changed, but because the world around it has, says a guest blog published in the website of the advocacy group SANDRP (South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People).

I was a little surprised to see how some of those whom I respect for taking a firm stand on patriarchal issues reacted to the manner in which they responded to the recent incident in Paris, in which women employees of the Eiffel Tower were asked to remain "invisible" on September 5 when 100 BAPS sadhus visited one of the world's top tourist destinations.

  A new study has ranked Ahmedabad as the least climate-resilient major city in the world , highlighting a dangerous gap between the city’s extreme physical vulnerability to climate hazards and its capacity to adapt. Cited by The New York Times , the analysis, conducted by geospatial artificial intelligence firm AlphaGeo , places the Indian city at the top of a list of global urban centres most exposed to climate risk.

  One day after Janmashtami , to be exact, on September 5, during my stay in the US, I was taken to two separate celebrations in a town on the East Coast, ostensibly to keep me engaged among NRIs . While one of them had, apart from the ritualistic puja at a temple in the name of Radhe Krishna , located around a small pond on the outskirts, dance and song performances, it was the second one that interested me the most.

  A people-led audit of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Mangolpuri’s Y-Block has brought renewed scrutiny to the accuracy of Delhi’s draft electoral rolls, with citizen volunteers and civil-society groups reporting cases in which voters allegedly found themselves wrongly classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate, or missing altogether from the draft list.

  The environmental advocacy group South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) has published a hard-hitting analysis of Pune's ongoing River Front Development (RFD) project , framing its concerns around fundamental questions that challenge the project's technical, ecological, and legal foundations.

  A bombshell study by the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) has revealed that Delhi's four Waste-to-Energy (WTE) incineration plants score a staggering 100 out of 100 on the Central Pollution Control Board's (CPCB) own Pollution Index — making them more toxic than coal-fired power plants, open-cast coal mining, and copper smelters — yet the regulator quietly moved them into a newly created "Blue" category last year that strips away critical environmental safeguards.

  A devastating catastrophe across the Himalayas has prompted river and dam advocacy group South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) to publish a scathing assessment of regional infrastructure planning, warning that planners and governments are committing fatal errors by treating Himalayan flood disasters merely as extreme water surges rather than catastrophic debris events . 

 Dalit women's autobiographical writing in India is emerging as a formidable archive of political resistance, functioning less as personal memoir and more as collective testimony to centuries of caste, gender and class oppression, according to a comprehensive analysis by Professor Garima Srivastava . 

A few days back, I happened to attend an interesting conversation among a group of young Indian Americans in Los Angeles. The theme proposed a deceptively simple proposition: can caste travel with people who leave India? The answer, the discussion made clear, is that it can—and that for a younger generation of the Indian diaspora, caste is not a subject safely confined to family histories, Indian villages, or the pages of social reform literature.

  In the rugged, resource-scarce hills of Gujarat’s Panchmahals district —one of India’s most underdeveloped regions, marked by high poverty, poor nutrition indicators, and large tribal, Dalit, and Muslim populations—women who once stayed confined to household labour and early marriages have forged a different path. Through ANANDI (Area Networking and Development Initiatives) and three grassroots women’s organisations in Devgadh Baria , Panam , and Gogamba , they have moved from isolated survival to organised collective power.

Deloitte India 's third edition of its people analytics maturity study , titled " Future of Work and People Analytics Maturity – The Indian Story " and released on 29 July 2026, offers a detailed, data-backed picture of how Indian organisations are progressing—and struggling—with AI-enabled workforce transformation . The report is based on insights from over 85 organisations across India and assesses how businesses are using people analytics to support workforce transformation and business decision-making.

As Europe grapples with an unprecedented summer heatwave, the fragility of nuclear power's dependence on water cooling has been laid bare — with 13 French reactors forced offline and similar shutdowns rippling across Hungary, Romania, and beyond. The crisis has prompted a stark warning from Indian power and climate policy analyst Shankar Sharma , who argues that if such failures can occur in Europe's relatively cooler climate, the risks for water-stressed India are orders of magnitude higher.

For generations, the seasonal Anjani River has been more than a waterway for the Patharvat community of Waghlud Khurd. It has been their classroom, their workplace, their temple, and their source of life. But today, the riverbed that once rang with the sound of hammers and chisels has fallen quiet. A centuries-old stone craft is dying—not because the river has changed, but because the world around it has, says a guest blog published in the website of the advocacy group SANDRP (South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People).

In a significant shift that appears to be reshaping the global maritime demolition landscape, oil tankers from the so-called "short fleet" — vessels operating under international sanctions — are reported to be increasingly making their final voyage to the shipbreaking yards of Alang-Sosiya in Gujarat's Bhavnagar district , industry data reveals.

  A new research has revealed that despite decades of liberalization, India's corporate dynasties have only tightened their grip on the economy—capturing 20% of GDP at their peak and expanding into nearly every industrial sector while quietly driving up prices.

Following my blog , in which I cited renowned mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik , who mocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Dimagi Naxal” remark by stating that the word “Naxal” refers to a “special river reed that grows in North Bengal (kash grass) with silvery flowers”, and that “Naxali” would be the name of Lord Shiva’s son Kartikeya, who was “born amongst these reeds”, I received an interesting rejoinder.

Following the Prime Minister’s “Dimagi Naxal” remark, there appears to have been a huge backlash, especially from protagonists of the “Cockroach Janata Party.” The term is being variously interpreted as a move to “isolate” dissidents, following the claim of a successful campaign against Naxalite violence. Social media is full of “Dimagi Naxal Party” memes, making a joke of an expression used, perhaps for the first time in India.

A new World Bank report , Building Human Capital Where It Matters , has revealed that India's human capital deficits are entrenched across homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, with maternal education creating lifelong skill gaps, rural health quality varying by 46 percentage points between villages, and self-employed workers earning barely half the returns to experience of their salaried peers.

A new report released by the World Bank has delivered a sobering assessment of global human capital development , finding that progress has stalled or reversed across much of the developing world. The report, Building Human Capital Where It Matters , quantifies how deficits in nutrition, learning, and employment can erase 51% of future earnings in low- and middle-income countries , while exposing stark inequities rooted in the settings where people live, learn, and work.

In an article published by the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) titled "Yamuna Manthan Aug 2026: Floodplains remain under threat", a series of recent scientific studies and regulatory developments highlight a critical reality: relying solely on sewage treatment and pollution control will not revive the Yamuna River. 

A few days ago, we went to San Francisco, ordinarily a six-hour drive from Los Angeles. However, it took us more than eight hours because a fire had broken out on one of the mountains along the highway, forcing us to take another route, part of which ran along the seashore.

The arrest and remand to judicial custody of Arun Pannalal , president of the Chhattisgarh Christian Forum , has triggered concern among civil-liberties, religious-freedom and minority-rights activists, who have accused the Chhattisgarh government of using criminal law to suppress dissenting voices.