India’s federal architecture was designed as a delicate balancing act. The Constitution’s framers, wary of both the chaos of excessive decentralisation and the dangers of over-centralisation witnessed during Partition, chose a model that leans towards the Centre while still granting states meaningful autonomy. For decades, this balance was tested but rarely broken, sustained by single-party
August 23, 2026 The Panama-flagged bulk carrier MV Ocean-Winner left Paradip Port on the night of August 20, carrying roughly 72,100 tonnes of iron ore fines toward Singapore. By the afternoon of August 22, the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre had lost contact with it entirely. The ship had gone down some 230 to 240 nautical
August 23, 2026 On August 20, a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, alongside Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana, took up petitions challenging CBSE’s decision to make three languages compulsory for Classes 6 to 9 from the 2026-27 academic year, with at least two required to be Indian languages. The Court’s
August 23, 2026 On August 21, hundreds of demonstrators gathered at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar under the banner of the Reservation Hatao Andolan, demanding changes to India’s reservation system and opposing new UGC equity regulations. By evening, police had cleared the site and detained more than fifty protesters. Within a day, the movement had fractured in
August 22, 2026 On August 3, Jan Suraaj founder Prashant Kishor won the Bankipur assembly bypoll by a margin of 19,324 votes, taking a Patna seat the BJP had held continuously since 1995. The constituency had effectively belonged to one family for three decades: first Navin Kishore Prasad Sinha, then his son Nitin Nabin, who
August 22, 2026 India’s economy is currently running two experiments at once. On one side, GST 2.0 has simplified the tax structure to mainly two slabs, 5 percent and 18 percent, alongside earlier income tax relief, putting an estimated 5.3 lakh crore rupees, or roughly 1.6 percent of GDP, back into the hands of consumers.
August 22, 2026 Since late July, the Supreme Court of India has been doing something unusual even by its own standards: legislating in real time, hearing by hearing, on how the Indian state should respond when tens of thousands of young people take to the streets at once. The trigger was the July 20 ‘Sansad
DA Editorial Desk August 21, 2026 A year on from Narendra Modi’s Tianjin trip — his first visit to China in seven years, undertaken to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit — it is worth asking what the handshake with Xi Jinping actually purchased. At the time, both leaders spoke the language of reconciliation: partners,
DA Editorial Desk (Sara Debbarma) August 21, 2026 On the evening of August 13, a wall of water and debris tore into a tunnel at the THDC hydropower site near Pipalkoti in Chamoli, catching an entire shift of workers inside. By the time rescue teams from the SDRF, NDRF, the Army and ITBP had finished
August 21, 2026 When the Bharatiya Janata Party announced this week that Amit Malviya — the man who had run its social media operation since 2015 — was being replaced by a little-known party functionary named Deepak Mhaskey, the language of the press release was almost aggressively bland. It called the move part of an
