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“I know you have thought about this a lot, can you give it a shape and help design a curriculum for IKS for teachers?”, was a question posed by a head of prestigious Teacher’s training college recently. I started with a disclaimer, “Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) is a term of contradiction. What constitutes the understanding of ‘Indian’, ‘Knowledge’ and ‘System’ as used today are all defined by the Western society from the 15th century onwards. IKS as it is currently used and articulated is either a continuation or a reaction to the colonial construct of these concepts".Let me…
What is the Future Institution in the Development sector?NGOs (of Civil Society organizations if you prefer the American term for it) in India have had the toughest decade in existence since Independence. Five key factors have impacted the sector which many are unable to cope with. These are -the changes in the regulatory ecosystemraising expectation of the newer generation of employeesimpact and entry of market forces in the development sectorfast changing needs of the communities they work with andthe ecosystem of funding and finance available for development organizationRegulatory…
Development that was a mainstay in many global forum - whether it be about poverty alleviation, healthcare, climate change adoption and education, no longer amongst the top headlines in the world in 2026. Since the beginning of 2026, almost the entire headlines has been on war and trade, as though these are the global priorities and not climate change and healthcare. Even Indian media's outlook since the beginning of this year has been on the budget for defense forces, our persistent chest thumping on AI leadership, and implications of US trade tariff on India and the overall politics…
Blaming the education system is one of well fed elite India's pastime. Despite major social leader of the past century (Swami Vivekananda, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, and J. Krishnamurthy, being the prominent ones) trying to reform education in their own way, the challenges of irrelevant and unreliable education quality persist. While the persistent challenge is structural, and each one of the above have tried to change the structure, their followers eventually descend to being content with content modifications. The alternatives to mainstream…
19th Dec 2025: Sustainability & Livelihoods - Academic conferences continued to be disappointing through the year as alternative imaginations and gatherings with genuine questions and non-pretentious resolutions made more realistic sense. The last one I attended was organized with the help of the Fair Trade network in MSSW which continued the streak of academic indifferent conferences. Billed as a national conference, I was invited to talk on sustainable rural livelihoods alongside a young entrepreneur from Andhra Pradesh. The chairperson for the session who had met me for the first…
Recent times we have been asked to provide a Gandhian perspective on several contemporary issues. Gandhians and Gandhian institutions in India largely are absent in the public domain. Gandhi's political, social and economic ideas being referred in public spaces is referred only in an obscure or tangential manner by the dominant left and right.
So, here is an offering. Make this February a reflective one using the prism of Gandhi to reflect on the contemporary issues. Job insecurity, climate anxiety, lifestyle induced diseases,…