The Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGA or NREGA) is the largest rights-based public employment programme in the world, signed into law in 2005. It faces imminent repeal by the Indian government, which intends to replace it with the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) VB – G RAM G Bill (2025).

The Supreme Court’s Centre for Research and Planning has released an important document — the Report on Judicial Conceptions of Caste (2025) — examining how India’s highest court has historically understood caste. While the report is institutionally framed as a self-reflective exercise, a close reading reveals something far more significant: a decades-long ideological struggle within the judiciary, between the transformative, egalitarian mandate of the Constitution and the deeply embedded worldview of the upper-caste social order.

The Save Bengal Journey, which began on November 29 from the Char of Raidak (the Dol Mela ground in Tufanganj), witnessed 19 sunrises and traversed 11 districts before concluding at BT Road in Belgharia. Even before independence, Belgharia witnessed the labour movement of 1938 and saw the red flag at the gates of the jute mills. The struggle to save Bengal today is the inheritor of that flowing stream of the communist movement. Now the industrial belt has been fragmented into pieces.

“IN Kerala, I can breathe,” said Seema Chishti, senior journalist and editor of The Wire. She was talking not only about the contrast between the toxic air in Delhi and the fresh breeze from the Arabian Sea that was wafting across the open-air stage she was on in Kochi as she spoke in a session as part of the first Indian Cultural Congress (ICC). Chishti was also talking about the toxicity of the politics and culture being propagated by those in power in Delhi.

AN ironic but unsurprising coincidence marked the beginning of the winter session of Parliament. The Modi government decided to have a long discussion on ‘Vande Mataram’, which PM Modi, Amit Shah and others from the government side used to sing paeans of fulsome praise for the nationalism and sacrifice of freedom fighters inspired by the National Song, A few days later, the Modi Cabinet announced that 100 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) would be allowed in the insurance sector, up from the current 74 per cent.