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India's states compete on welfare in a way that has no precise parallel in comparable democracies. Because state governments control significant spending authority over health, education, agriculture, and social assistance; because state elections are frequent and high-stakes; and because India's large proportion of low-income voters is acutely sensitive to material welfare promises, state governments have progressively developed the political practice of outbidding each other — and the central government — with escalating welfare announcements.  The terminology for this phenomenon has entered official political discourse: Prime Minister Modi criticised what he called "revadi culture" (revadi being a traditional sweet), characterising competing welfare promises as unsustainable populism in 2022. The Supreme Court took up a public interest litigation in 2022 on the question of whether election promises of freebies amounted to corrupt practice under the Representation o...

The Goods and Services Tax, implemented on July 1, 2017, was the most fundamental reform of India's indirect tax system since independence. It replaced a complex, multi-layered structure of central excise, service tax, state VAT, entry tax, luxury tax, and a dozen other levies with a single integrated tax collected simultaneously by the Centre (CGST) and states (SGST) on intra-state supplies, and by the Centre alone on inter-state supplies (IGST).  The 101st Constitutional Amendment that enabled it inserted Article 246A — granting both Parliament and state legislatures simultaneous constitutional power to legislate on GST — and Article 279A, establishing the GST Council as the constitutional forum for Centre-state GST coordination. In constitutional terms, GST represented a significant exercise in cooperative federalism: states voluntarily surrendered their largest independent revenue sources (VAT, entry tax) in exchange for inclusion in a more efficient, revenue-productive tax sys...

India is urbanising rapidly — the 2011 census counted 377 million urban residents; projections suggest 600 million by 2030. This urbanisation is producing cities and towns that generate the bulk of India's GDP, attract most of its investment, and account for a disproportionate share of its tax revenue. And yet India's cities are governed by some of the weakest urban governments in the world. Municipal corporations in cities of 5 to 15 million people — Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata — have elected mayors and councils with formal jurisdiction over 18 functions listed in the Twelfth Schedule of the Constitution (inserted by the 74th Amendment in 1992), but exercise real authority over very few of them.  Representational Image: Urban Local Bodies — Why Cities Lack Power in India Water supply in Delhi is handled by the Delhi Jal Board; in Mumbai by BMC (which is an exception); in Bengaluru by the BWSSB — all state agencies accountable to state governments, no...

India's Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to move freely throughout the territory and to reside and settle in any part of the country under Articles 19(1)(d) and 19(1)(e). These are not minor provisions — they are fundamental rights that establish India as a single internal market for labour, treating state boundaries not as barriers to movement but as administrative divisions within a unitary citizenship.  The census of 2001 counted migrants — people who had changed their place of residence — at approximately 30% of India's population; more recent estimates suggest 400–600 million internal migrants of various categories, including lifetime migrants (those born in a different state or district from where they currently live), circular migrants (who oscillate between home and destination), and seasonal migrants (who move for specific work seasons). This is among the largest human mobility systems in any country. Representational Image: Understanding Federalism and...

India's constitutional identity sits in permanent productive tension between two competing imperatives: the recognition that a diverse, continental-scale society of 1.4 billion people requires governance that is responsive to regional variation, linguistic difference, and sub-national political identity; and the conviction — embedded in the Constitution's text from 1950 and repeatedly vindicated by historical experience — that only a strong Centre can maintain national unity against the centrifugal forces of diversity.  The term most commonly applied to this tension — "quasi-federal" — captures the legal form but not the political and institutional dynamics that have evolved over 75 years of constitutional democracy. India began its post-independence life with a Constitution that leaned heavily toward the Centre; it has progressively evolved toward more genuinely competitive, contested federalism in which states have more political voice and more institutional resourc...