Rajiv Shah's News Blog
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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.At their zenith in 2012, the gross revenues of India's top 25 family business houses equaled one-fifth of the entire country's GDP.
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
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
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.In
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
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. The SANDRP article emphasizes that "their findings
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.It was my second visit to San Francisco, and a very short one. Earlier I visited San Francisco about two years
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.Pannalal was reportedly arrested from his residence in Raipur late on Friday night, August 7, and was
India’s housing market is increasingly showing two very different faces: affluent buyers are driving demand for premium homes, even as the supply of genuinely affordable housing continues to shrink.The contrast is particularly visible in South Delhi, where prices of luxury independent floors rose as much as 21% year-on-year in the April-June quarter of 2026, according to a report by Golden Growth
India’s rapid economic expansion is accompanied by an increasingly concentrated distribution of wealth, raising fresh questions over how headlines GDP figures reflect the economic reality of ordinary Indians.A two year old social-media post by former bureaucrat Anil Swarup, founder chairman of Nexus of Good, has resurrected a debate over the gap between India’s aggregate economic size and
I have visited deserts in India, one of them being the Rann of Kutch, which is home to the rare wild ass. It has an ecosystem of its own. The vast expanse of the Rann is mostly barren, with wild asses moving around in groups. There are a few bushes and scattered patches of water bodies. I have travelled across the Rann not once, but half a dozen times.Another desert I have visited is
