Author: Mousumi Roy

Inequality is not a distant problem. It is visible in every city, street and screen. Yet it often goes unnoticed. The middle class looks away, buffered by relative comfort. The rich, who benefit most from the system, dismiss concerns. Meanwhile, people living in poverty are too preoccupied with survival to pause and reflect, as Chaplin’s factory worker does in Modern Times, swallowed by the machine. The numbers are staggering. Just 10 per cent of the global population controls 90 per cent of the wealth. The rest fight for scraps. Capital, another name for entrenched wealth, dominates almost every aspect of…

Public opinion on the recent eviction of hawkers from railway stations appears sharply divided. One side argues that hawkers have occupied railway property illegally, have no ownership, title or formal contract, and therefore have no right to remain. The other argues that evicting people without rehabilitation is unjust, especially when their livelihood depends on that space. Ownership Is Not the Only Right The first mistake in the pro-eviction argument is the assumption that only ownership creates rights. In almost every legal system, ownership and the right of use are treated as distinct. This distinction is essential wherever the property in…

For much of modern history, India worried about having too many people. Population control became a reflex in policy and public debate, shaping everything from public health messaging to political common sense. That reflex now needs to change. Across the world, fertility is falling, not only in rich countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, Europe and the United States, but also in Latin America, Southeast Asia and India. The United Nations’ 2024 revision puts global fertility at 2.25 births per woman, projected to fall to 2.1 by the late 2040s. India’s own total fertility rate is now around…

India wants to become a major innovation economy. The ambition is visible everywhere: in the language of startups, artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure, semiconductors, venture capital and global capability centres. We rightly speak of talent, capital and technology as the engines of the future. But there is another condition of innovation that is easier to ignore because it usually works silently in the background: institutions. Entrepreneurs like to think of themselves as agents of progress. They build products, raise money, hire engineers and disrupt old sectors. In technology, especially, there is a strong belief that the future belongs to those…