The Union Budget had room for cancer care, mental health, biopharma, and even wellness narratives. But in a country choking on pollution and chronic respiratory disease, lung health barely featured. What we don't budget for, we quietly accept as collateral damage.
Bold education reforms promise equity and autonomy, but many never make it past courtrooms. From NEP pushback to UGC regulations under judicial stay, litigation has become routine. Is India announcing reforms faster than it is building consensus?
At 40, you're "overqualified," and quietly laid off. At 22, you're "lucky to be here," and slowly bored out. Welcome to 2026's job market: not a crash, but a split reality.
The new middle-class nightmare isn't recession but redundancy at 40. It takes one call, one email, one "restructuring", and your peak earning years are wiped out. It is true, India is creating a 20-year gap where people are neither employed nor retired, just stuck in survival mode.
This isn't about rankings, but about who gets to write the rules of the future. While China is positioning itself to take Harvard's place in global science, India is left to choose between building its own research power, or staying a dependent player in someone else's Cold War.
Every year, India repeats the same contradiction: it needs more specialists, yet can't fill the PG seats it has. When vacancies pile up, the quick fix is to lower the bar and call it "saving public investment." But that's the wrong math in a system where Resident doctors run hospital care.
The easiest way to talk about autism is to find someone to blame. The hardest way is to build systems that actually support autistic children and their families. We, however, keep choosing the easy way.
When celebrities biohack in public, experimentation becomes an endorsement. Devices meant for controlled settings are quickly reframed as wellness upgrades, nudging millions to optimise their bodies and brains without fully understanding the risks involved.
What if JEE is no longer the same exam for everyone? The push for adaptive testing could let unseen algorithms shape ranks, and even futures, without public scrutiny. Is this a fair "modern" reform?
Germany was supposed to be the safe choice. Affordable, regulated and predictable, it was marketed in India as a refuge from the tightening visa regimes of the United States and the UK. That belief is now being tested as Indian students enroled in certain private university programmes face the prospect of deportation. The episode has exposed a question India has long sidestepped.
