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India's decade of digital transformation — from the India Stack's identity-payment-data trilogy to the IndiaAI Mission's AI compute investment, from UPI's extraordinary payments scale to the DPDPA's data protection framework — is a unique experiment in using technology-led governance innovation as a development accelerator.  No other country has built digital public infrastructure at India's scale in a decade while being a lower-middle-income economy; no other developing country has produced the combination of world-class digital infrastructure (UPI, Aadhaar, DigiLocker), thriving private technology companies (TCS, Infosys, Paytm, Zomato), and a growing AI policy architecture that India has assembled.  Representational Image: What India's Digital Transformation Reveals About Development The ORF's ten-year assessment (August 2025) judged the decade as producing "critical DPIs like Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker" that have "become instrumental...

India's space programme — historically a state monopoly centred on ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) — has undergone a fundamental governance transformation since 2020. The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe), established in 2020, provides a regulatory and promotional framework for private sector space activities; the New Space Policy (2023) articulated the government's intent to open the space sector to private enterprise, allowing private companies to design, build, and launch rockets, satellites, and space services without government partnership requirements.  The result has been a rapid growth of the Indian private space sector: Skyroot Aerospace achieved India's first private rocket launch (Vikram-S, November 2022); AgniKul Cosmos successfully tested the world's first single-piece 3D-printed rocket engine in flight (2024); and Pixxel, SatSure, and other startups are building commercial earth observation satellite constellatio...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Media outlet Newslaundry has, since its founding, positioned itself as the press that covers the press, the one outlet with the institutional courage to hold the mirror up to Indian journalism. Its tagline, sabki dhulai , translates roughly as: everyone gets washed. The promise, burnished through years of subscription pitches, is seductive. You know the stories that get buried or ignored by mainstream media? With your support, we can do those stories. On June 1, 2026, Newslaundry published a piece about the Jaipur Literature Festival's Island of Ireland edition. It was titled, with characteristic efficiency, " JLF's Ireland edition wraps up. " It reads, in its entirety, like a festival brochure written by a team who enjoys the hospitality rather thoroughly. Representational Image: Why Newslaundry Covered JLF Like a Festival Brochure The dispatch opens with a graceful sentence about a festival that ...

India's cryptocurrency policy is a case study in regulatory ambiguity with revenue clarity: the government has not legalised cryptocurrency trading but has not banned it either; it has imposed extremely punitive taxes (30% flat rate on all gains, with no offset for losses across assets; 1% Tax Deducted at Source on transactions above ₹50,000) while simultaneously developing its own Central Bank Digital Currency (the e-Rupee).  The Finance Act 2022 introduced the Virtual Digital Asset (VDA) taxation framework — treating crypto gains like winnings from gambling rather than investment income, with no long-term capital gains benefit and no loss offsetting.  Representational Image: How India Regulates Cryptocurrencies and Digital Assets This punitive taxation structure effectively discourages Indian crypto trading without banning it; domestic crypto exchange volumes fell approximately 90% after the 2022 tax framework; Indian traders migrated to offshore exchanges (Binance, OKX...

India has 260 million school-going children in approximately 1.5 million schools — the world's largest formal education system by enrolment. Digital education's penetration into this system has been accelerated by COVID-19 (which forced online learning at scale in 2020–21 but exposed the depth of the digital divide in education) and by a sustained government investment in public digital education infrastructure.  DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) — a national digital learning platform — hosts over 150 crore (1.5 billion) learning sessions; PM eVIDYA integrates DIKSHA with Doordarshan's 200 DTH channels for students without internet; SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) provides online university courses; and the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) delivers engineering courses in partnership with IITs. Representational Image: How Digital Education Is Transforming Indian Schools India's private edtech s...

India has identified semiconductor manufacturing and design as a strategic national priority, motivated by the supply chain disruptions of the COVID-19 era (which exposed India's complete dependence on foreign chips for automobiles, electronics, medical devices, and telecommunications equipment) and by the growing consensus that semiconductor supply chains will be a geopolitical flashpoint in the coming decades.  The India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) — launched under the Programme for Development of Semiconductors and Display Manufacturing Ecosystem in 2021 with an initial outlay of ₹76,000 crore ($9.2 billion) — provides fiscal incentives of up to 50% of project cost for semiconductor fabrication and display manufacturing.  Representational Image: How India's Semiconductor Policy Works The scheme attracted the first concrete investments: Micron Technology (US semiconductor company) is building India's first modern semiconductor assembly, testing, marking, and packaging (...

India's digital health infrastructure has developed rapidly since COVID-19 exposed the limits of India's paper-based health records system and demonstrated the value of digital health coordination at scale. The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) — the government's overarching digital health framework — aims to create a national digital health ecosystem connecting patients, providers, labs, pharmacies, and insurers through interoperable digital systems.  At its core is the ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account) — a 14-digit health ID that functions as the health equivalent of Aadhaar, linking a citizen's health records across providers. By 2025, over 60 crore (600 million) ABHA IDs had been created; the CoWIN vaccination platform (developed for COVID-19 vaccination management) demonstrated India's ability to build health-specific digital infrastructure at extraordinary speed and scale. Representational Image: How India's Digital Health System Works India's...