Times of Better Bharat

India's GDP stood at US$3.96 trillion in 2025 and the economy grew 7.6% that year, according to the World Bank. GNI per capita on the Atlas method was US$2,760, GDP per capita at purchasing power parity was 11,748 international dollars, consumer price inflation ran at 2.4% and unemployment at 4.2% of the labour force. The investment rate was 34.6% of GDP.

Alongside those figures sits the external account.

A 22.3% export base

Exports of goods and services were 22.3% of GDP in 2025, World Bank data show. India's share of world merchandise exports was 1.8% in 2024, on UNCTAD figures compiled by Our World in Data, and its commercial services exports were 4.3% of the world total, the eighth largest, according to the WTO's 2025 statistics.

It is against that base that the Commerce Department held an awareness programme in Jaipur on 'leveraging free trade agreements' to expand export opportunities, the Press Information Bureau said in a release issued in the past two days. Agreements are negotiated by the Union government; what exporters meet at the border is administered through customs and through state-level rules on land, power and logistics.

Financing the gap

Net foreign direct investment inflows were US$40.8 billion in 2025. Remittances received were US$150.7 billion, the current account balance was -0.5% of GDP and reserves covered 7.85 months of imports, all on World Bank figures. Manufacturing was 13.5% of GDP.

What would have to change

Two further figures frame the constraint. Tax revenue was 6.9% of GDP in 2022, the reading given here, and labour-force participation was 55.7% of the population aged 15 and over in 2025, with women at 32.4%. A goods-export share of 1.8% and a services share of 4.3% sit alongside both.

The levers are identifiable. The Commerce Department owns the agreement calendar and the export-promotion machinery it was advertising in Jaipur. The Finance Ministry sets the duty structure that determines whether imported inputs cost more or less than domestic ones. State governments administer the land, power and inspection regimes that decide how quickly a plant can be built and run. None of those is settled by a growth rate of 7.6%, which is why the export share is the number to read next to it rather than the growth rate alone.

The Supreme Court constituted a High-Powered Enquiry Committee to investigate all aspects of the violence that took place in July 2026 at Jantar Mantar in Delhi and at various locations outside Delhi, the Press Information Bureau said in a release issued in the past two days.

The inquiry opens against a measurable backdrop, and the measures do not all point the same way.

The rule-of-law measures

The World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index 2025 placed India 86th of 143 countries, with a score of 0.49 on a 0–1 scale, down seven places on 2024. The World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators, also for 2025, put rule of law at -0.13 on a scale running from -2.5 to +2.5.

V-Dem's judicial checks on government index — the extent to which courts constrain the executive — stood at 0.67 on a 0–1 scale in 2025. The weaker link is before trial: 72.6% of the prison population was held as pre-trial detainees on 31 December 2024, according to the World Prison Brief, which sources the figure to the National Crime Records Bureau. The prison population rate was 37 per 100,000 people in 2023.

Two indices that moved the other way

The Corruption Perceptions Index for 2025, released on 10 February 2026, ranked India 91st of 182 with a score of 39, up five places from 96th (score 38) in 2024 — still below the index's global average score of 42. Expert-coded measures read differently: V-Dem's political corruption index was 0.68, its public sector corruption index 0.69 and its executive corruption index 0.69 in 2025, on a 0–1 scale where higher is worse.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index placed India 41st of 167 in 2023, up five places, in its 'flawed democracy' category and 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.

Civic space

The 2026 World Press Freedom Index ranked India 157th of 180, with a score of 31.96, down six places from 151st in 2025 and inside RSF's 'very serious' band. RSF cites violence against journalists, concentrated ownership and the use of defamation and national-security law; the Indian government has publicly disputed RSF's methodology and sample size. Political stability and absence of violence was -0.61 on the World Bank's -2.5 to +2.5 scale in 2025.

What would change

Pre-trial detention is the most tractable of these numbers, and the least dependent on any single statute. It is produced by arrest and bail practice — state police forces and the courts that hear bail applications — and it has persisted across several governments. The Supreme Court's committee can establish what happened in July; it cannot by itself raise the clearance rate of undertrials. That sits with the Union Home Ministry, the state police forces and the judiciary.

The Union government has rationalised trade margins on 137 anti-cancer drugs, the Press Information Bureau said in a release issued in the past two days. Margin rationalisation caps the mark-up between what a manufacturer charges and what a patient pays, and it is the instrument India has used to bring down the retail price of imported and patented medicines.

It addresses one component of a larger bill.

Who pays

Households met 43.9% of India's health spending out of pocket in 2023, according to World Bank and WHO data. That is the structural fact behind most medication-affordability arguments: a margin cap lowers the price of 137 molecules and leaves the financing split unchanged. The WHO's universal health coverage index, which tracks coverage of essential services and financial protection, put India at 69 out of 100 in 2023.

The supply side

Doctors per 1,000 people were 0.7 in 2020 and hospital beds per 1,000 were 1.6 in 2021, both World Bank and WHO estimates. Where capacity is thin, patients travel and pay, and the out-of-pocket share reflects that as much as it reflects drug prices.

Outcomes

Life expectancy at birth was 72.2 years in 2024. Maternal mortality was 80 per 100,000 live births in 2023, tuberculosis incidence 187 per 100,000 people in 2024 and the suicide rate 12.6 per 100,000 in 2021, all World Bank figures compiled with WHO. On the preventive side, 94% of children aged 12–23 months had received childhood immunisation in 2024 — a coverage rate that has held up better than the curative system around it.

What would change

Two levers would move the 43.9%. The first is public provision: the share households pay falls when services are delivered free at the point of use, which is a spending decision taken jointly by the Union Health Ministry and by state health departments, since delivery is largely a state function. The second is price regulation of the kind now applied to the 137 cancer drugs, extended beyond oncology to the molecules where out-of-pocket spending concentrates.

Margin caps are the cheaper lever and the narrower one. They change what a drug costs. They do not change who pays for the ward, the diagnostic or the follow-up, and those are what a 43.9% out-of-pocket share is mostly made of.

India's space economy will reach US$40–45 billion in seven to eight years, Dr Jitendra Singh said, citing the opening of the sector to private investment after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to open it, the Press Information Bureau said in a release issued in the past two days.

The projection rests on an input base that is measured separately and moves more slowly.

Inputs

Research and development spending was 0.6% of GDP in 2020, on World Bank and UNESCO figures, and researchers numbered 259.3 per million people the same year. Government spending on education was 4.1% of GDP in 2022, and gross enrolment in higher education was 34.4% in 2025.

Outputs

The Global Innovation Index 2025 ranked India 38th of 139, up one place on 2024 and ten on 2020. WIPO places India 52nd on innovation inputs and 32nd on outputs, calls it the top-performing lower-middle-income economy and records that it has over-performed relative to its income level for 15 consecutive years.

Residents filed 63,217 patent applications in 2024, and Indian authors published 228,174 scientific articles in 2023, both World Bank figures. The distance between the input rank and the output rank is the standing puzzle in this data: a thin research base is being converted into a comparatively strong output.

Artificial intelligence

The Global AI Index, in its sixth edition, published by The Observer on 4 December 2025, ranked India 17th of 93, down seven places; that edition added 12 countries and reweighted indicators, so the fall is not a like-for-like comparison with 2024. Oxford Insights' Government AI Readiness Index 2025 ranked India 27th of 195 with a score of 66.55, up 19 places on 2024, though the first December 2025 release printed India 21st with incorrect data and corrected scores were issued in January 2026.

What would change

A space economy of US$40–45 billion in seven to eight years is a claim about private capital, and private capital follows the input base rather than the projection. The lever with the widest reach is the 0.6% of GDP going to research and development, which is set by Union budget allocations through the Department of Science and Technology, by state spending on universities, and by whether firms carry a larger share of it.

Until that share moves, India's output rankings will keep outrunning its input rankings — which is a strength in the innovation index and a constraint on the sectors that need laboratories, not just engineers.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has proposed science-based limits for pesticide residues in tea, and separately moved to restrict added sucrose and fructose in food products for infants up to six months, the Press Information Bureau said in two releases issued in the past two days.

Both are standards, and standards are the part of nutrition policy that can be set without a budget line. The outcomes they are meant to shift are measured elsewhere.

The hunger measure

The Global Hunger Index 2025 ranked India 102nd of 123 countries with a score of 25.8, in the 'serious' band — an improvement on 105th of 127 with a score of 27.3 in 2024. The index's components include child wasting at 18.7%, among the highest rates in the report, stunting at 32.9% and undernourishment at 12.0%. The Indian government has formally contested the methodology.

Where the sources disagree

The World Bank's child stunting figure is 35.5% of under-fives, from 2020, and its undernourishment figure is 9.8% of the population, from 2024 — different years and different instruments from the Global Hunger Index's 32.9% and 12.0%. The figures are not interchangeable, and quoting either alone overstates the precision of the measurement. On the multidimensional measure, the 2025 global MPI, drawing on NFHS-5, gives India an MPI value of 0.069 with a headcount of 16.4%, or 231,828 thousand people in the survey year.

Production

Cereal yield was 3,632.5 kg per hectare in 2024, a World Bank figure. Yield is the supply-side variable. The 18.7% wasting rate is the outcome variable, and it responds to diets and to the first thousand days rather than to the size of the harvest.

What would change

FSSAI sets the standards — the tea residue limits and the restriction on added sugars in infant food are both its instruments, and both now go out for consultation and enforcement. Delivery sits with the Women and Child Development Ministry's nutrition programmes and with the state governments and anganwadi workers who run them, and it is there that an 18.7% wasting rate is either reduced or reproduced.

The infant-food rule is the more consequential of the two releases. It targets the period in which stunting and wasting are set, at the point of sale, and its effect depends on inspection capacity — the same constraint the tea proposal raises.

The Commission for Air Quality Management reviewed compliance and enforcement in the National Capital Region and conducted 124 inspections between 25 September and 9 October 2026, the Press Information Bureau said in a release issued in the past two days.

Those inspections sit against two very different readings of India's air.

The measurement

IQAir's 2025 World Air Quality Report, its eighth, ranked India sixth of 143 countries on population-weighted PM2.5, at 48.9 µg/m³ — close to ten times the WHO guideline of 5 µg/m³. That was an improvement on 2024, when India was fifth of 143 at 50.6 µg/m³. Delhi remained the world's most polluted capital at 82.2 µg/m³, itself a three-year low for the city in the report's series.

The Environmental Performance Index 2026, published by Yale's Center for Environmental Law and Policy, ranked India 176th of 177 — second from last, ahead only of Laos — with a score of 22.46. That number is [CONTESTED]: the Environment Ministry rejected the 2022 edition outright as methodologically unsound. Yale cites air quality, coal dependence and weak biodiversity protection. India's ten-year change in score is nonetheless positive, at +7.47, and it ranked 141st in 2016.

The energy mix behind it

Renewables were 24.1% of electricity generation in 2025, on Ember and Energy Institute data, and solar generation was 196 TWh. India emitted 3,153.83 million tonnes of CO₂ in 2024, or 2.17 tonnes per person, World Bank figures show.

The Climate Change Performance Index 2026, which leaves its top three places empty by design, ranked India 23rd of 67 with a score of 61.31, down 13 places on 2025 and from 'high' to 'medium' performer.

What would change

The CAQM's powers run through the NCR, and 124 inspections are enforcement, not abatement. The longer-run number is the 24.1% renewable share, which is decided by generation and grid investment — the Union Power Ministry, the state electricity boards and the regulators. The shorter-run number is the winter PM2.5 reading, which is decided by transport, construction dust, industry and crop-residue burning, several of which cross state boundaries.

Delhi's 82.2 µg/m³ will not fall because an inspection was logged. It falls when the sources outside the capital's administrative control are covered by the same plan, which is a decision for the CAQM's statutory remit and for the states that sit inside it.