Times of Better Bharat

The Reserve Bank of India has placed on its website the Report of the Advisory Committee on Ways and Means Advances (WMA) to State Governments. The committee was chaired by I S N Prasad, former Additional Chief Secretary, Government of Karnataka. Its terms of reference included a review of the state WMA scheme.

The WMA is the short-term bridge the RBI extends to state governments to cover mismatches between receipts and payments. Its ceilings and pricing are reset periodically, which makes this review routine but consequential: state treasuries lean on the facility when tax collections and central transfers do not line up with expenditure.

The market's own reading

On the same day, the RBI's auction of state government securities drew a cut-off yield of 7.9724% on a re-issue of Assam's 2046 paper, with ₹800 crore accepted. Bihar accepted ₹800 crore on a re-issue of its 2035 paper at 7.8797%, and ₹1,200 crore on a re-issue of its 2051 paper at 7.9643%, according to the central bank's published auction result.

Those are the prices at which sub-national borrowers are raising long-tenor money — worth setting beside the national aggregates that dominate the fiscal debate.

Where the debt figures actually sit

On the International Monetary Fund's general-government definition, which combines the Centre and the states, India's gross debt stood at 83.4% of GDP in 2026, down from a peak near 89% in 2020. That figure is marked contested. The Union Budget's central-government figure is about 55.6% of GDP for FY2026-27. The two are not contradictory: they cover different entities, and quoting one against the other produces most of the confusion in circulation.

The World Bank's series, compiled with the IMF, puts central government debt at 46.5% of GDP, but that reading is from 2018. Tax revenue stood at 6.9% of GDP in 2022, the most recent figure in that series.

What would have to change

The binding constraint on either tier is not a WMA ceiling but the revenue base. A tax take of 6.9% of GDP limits how much the Centre and the states can borrow before the general-government ratio moves. The levers sit with the Union finance ministry on tax policy and transfers, and with state finance departments on their own revenue effort. Both tiers' choices arrive in the same IMF number.

A higher WMA ceiling buys time within a financial year. It does not alter the arithmetic beyond it.

The government has released sub-regional trial indices of service production (ISP) for July 2026, on a base year of 2024-25, according to a Press Information Bureau release.

The wording matters. A trial series on a base year two years old cannot yet produce a year-on-year growth rate, so the July figures do not on their own establish a services trajectory. What they begin is a time series, and a geographically finer one than the national accounts provide.

The growth picture that does exist

On the World Bank's 2025 figures, India's GDP was US$3.96 trillion and grew 7.6% a year. GNI per capita, on the Atlas method, was US$2,760; GDP per capita at purchasing power parity was 11,748 international dollars. The investment rate was 34.6% of GDP, exports of goods and services 22.3% of GDP, and manufacturing 13.5% of GDP. Net foreign direct investment inflows were US$39.1 billion, remittances received US$150.7 billion, and foreign-exchange reserves covered 7.88 months of imports. Consumer price inflation was 2.4% a year.

The jobs side

Unemployment stood at 4.2% of the labour force in 2025, on World Bank and ILO data. Labour-force participation was 55.7% of the population aged 15 and above, and participation among women was 32.4%.

The second of those three numbers is the one that governs how much output growth translates into household income. A participation rate of 55.7% means a large share of working-age adults are outside the labour force measured here, and the gap between the overall rate and the women's rate is where most of it sits.

What the new index has to prove

High-frequency service production data is useful for locating turning points between quarterly GDP prints, and for separating a national trend from a state-level one. Whether the trial series does either depends on how quickly it is extended and whether revisions are published alongside it — a decision for the statistical system, which MoSPI also supplies for the inflation series cited above.

With inflation at 2.4% and investment at 34.6% of GDP, the question the data will have to answer is whether demand is holding. The question on employment is answered by the participation rate, not by the output index.

NITI Aayog has held a national workshop under its State Support Mission on the theme 'Viksit Panchayat: combining people, places, resources and opportunities', according to a government release. The subject is devolution — what local bodies are given to work with, and by whom.

What the outside measures show

V-Dem, published through Our World in Data, scores institutions on a 0–1 scale for 2025. India's electoral democracy index is 0.38 and its liberal democracy index 0.26. Freedom of expression is 0.46. Judicial checks on government, at 0.67, and women's political participation, at 0.71, are the two strongest readings. On the corruption sub-indices, where higher is worse, political corruption is 0.68, public sector corruption 0.69 and executive corruption 0.69.

The World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators, on a scale running from −2.5 to +2.5, give India 0.50 for government effectiveness in 2025 — the only positive reading of the six. Voice and accountability is −0.15, rule of law −0.13, regulatory quality −0.17, control of corruption −0.28, and political stability and absence of violence −0.61, the weakest of the set.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index ranked India 41st of 167 countries in 2023, up five places from 2022, and classified it a 'flawed democracy', tied with Poland. The score peaked at 7.92 in 2014, when India ranked 27th, and fell to 6.61 in 2020, when it ranked 53rd.

On corruption perceptions, Transparency International's 2025 index, released on 10 February 2026, ranked India 91st of 182 countries with a score of 39 — up five places from 96th and a score of 38 in 2024. That remains below the global average score of 42. India ranked ahead of Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and behind China at 43 and Bhutan at 71. Some trackers still describe the index as covering 180 countries; the 2025 edition covered 182.

Women hold 13.8% of lower-chamber seats in the Lok Sabha, on IPU data carried by Our World in Data for 2025.

What the scoreboard cannot do

These indices measure outcomes and perceptions, not effort, and they sit at different distances from local government. What they establish is the starting point a devolution exercise is working from. The readings span 2014 to 2026 and were produced under different administrations; a pattern that persists across that range is structural rather than partisan. The levers sit with state governments, which legislate for and fund local bodies, and with the Union, which designs the mission frameworks they operate under.

Union minister Manohar Lal launched the Pragati-50 initiative in New Delhi for the development of 50 model cities for cleanliness, according to a government release. Under the same Swachhata Hi Seva 2026 campaign, a 'SafaiMitra Suraksha evam Samman Shivir' — a safety and felicitation camp for sanitation workers — is to be held tomorrow. The Ministry of Textiles and its organisations ran cleanliness and awareness activities under the campaign.

Where coverage stands

The most recent international series give the scale of what remains. The World Bank and WHO-UNICEF put safely managed sanitation at 62.8% of the population in 2024 — which leaves 37.2% outside that measure. Safely managed drinking water, on the same source, covered 76.4% of the population in 2024, leaving 23.6% outside. Access to clean cooking fuel stood at 76.7% in 2023, and access to electricity at 99.9% in 2024.

The distinction between a household facility and 'safely managed' sanitation matters: the second test follows excreta through treatment and disposal, not merely to a toilet. That makes 62.8% the harder number, and the one closer to what a model-city programme would have to change.

Why the last mile is municipal

Sanitation is a service delivered by municipal bodies, financed substantially through state governments, with the Union government setting mission frameworks and transfers. A 50-city programme is therefore best read as an attempt to concentrate effort where the service chain is longest — collection, transport, treatment and disposal — rather than as an expansion of household assets, which is where earlier phases of the national cleanliness mission concentrated.

Worker safety sits inside the same chain. The camp announced for tomorrow concerns the people who enter drains and septic tanks; that is an occupational-protection question for employers and municipal authorities, not a behavioural one.

What would have to change

The measure of success is whether city-level coverage is published with the same regularity as the national aggregate. If Pragati-50 produces 50 cities whose safely managed sanitation and water figures can be tracked annually against the World Bank and WHO-UNICEF series, the programme will be assessable. If only the count of cities is reported, the 62.8% national figure will keep carrying the entire argument.

The Technology Development Board has signed an agreement with Multi Nano Sense Technologies for ₹37.51 crore in research, development and innovation support, to develop an indigenous multi-gas sensor platform, according to a government release.

Gas sensors are a component technology. They sit inside industrial safety systems, emissions monitoring and the networks that produce air-quality readings. Building them domestically substitutes an import rather than creating a new final product, which is usually where a research subsidy earns its return.

The national backdrop

The most recent World Bank and UNESCO figure for research and development spending is 0.6% of GDP, on 2020 data. Researchers numbered 259.3 per million people in the same year. Patent applications by residents stood at 26,267 in 2021. Government spending on education was 4.1% of GDP in 2022, and gross enrolment in higher education was 34.4% in 2025.

Where the outputs land

The Global Innovation Index for 2025, published by WIPO, ranked India 38th of 139 economies — up one place on 2024 and ten places since 2020. India leads Central and Southern Asia, is the top-performing lower-middle-income economy in the index, and has over-performed relative to its income level for fifteen consecutive years. Within the same index, India ranks 52nd on innovation inputs and 32nd on outputs.

That input-output gap is the standing feature of the position. The system converts a relatively thin research base into a better-than-expected output rank, which suggests both that the base is being used efficiently and that it is smaller than the economy's size would support.

What would have to change

The constraint the data points to is on the input side: 0.6% of GDP and 259.3 researchers per million. A single ₹37.51 crore commitment is small against either. Raising research spending is a budget decision taken by the Union government and by state governments that fund universities, alongside industry's own research lines; the researcher count moves only as fast as postgraduate and doctoral capacity, which the 34.4% gross enrolment ratio feeds over years rather than quarters.

The component-level work funded here is the kind that shows up in the output rank before it shows up in the spending ratio.

The Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) has approved a revised Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) schedule, tightening measures covering vehicles, dust and pollution control, according to a government release. GRAP stages are the administrative triggers that switch restrictions on as air quality deteriorates. The revision lands at the start of the season in which those triggers are used.

What the measurements say

IQAir's 2025 World Air Quality Report, its eighth edition, placed India sixth of 143 countries on population-weighted PM2.5 at 48.9 µg/m³ — a reading close to ten times the WHO guideline of 5 µg/m³. The concentration was lower than in the previous edition, when India was fifth at 50.6 µg/m³; the rank number slipped by one place.

Delhi remained the world's most polluted capital at 82.2 µg/m³, itself a three-year low in the report.

Ranked against a different field and a different method, the picture is harsher. The Environmental Performance Index for 2026 placed India 176th of 177 countries with a score of 22.46 — second from last, ahead only of Laos. That figure is contested: Yale's index cites air quality, coal dependence and weak biodiversity protection, and India's Environment Ministry rejected the 2022 edition outright as methodologically unsound. Even inside the same index, India's ten-year change in score is positive at +7.47, and its trajectory runs from 141st in 2016 to 177th in the later editions.

The indoor share

Ambient readings are only part of the exposure. The World Bank and WHO put access to clean cooking fuel at 76.7% of the population in 2023, leaving 23.3% outside that measure — households whose combustion feeds both indoor and outdoor PM2.5.

The levers

Concentrations fall only when emissions fall across sources: vehicles, road and construction dust, industry, and household fuels. CAQM's revised schedule operates on the transport and dust categories inside Delhi-NCR. National fuel and industrial standards are set at the Union level; construction and waste rules are enforced by state and municipal bodies. Air quality is one of the few areas where measurement is now continuous and public, which means next winter will be compared directly with this one.