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Essays
and research notes.

Varna Sri Raman writes on India's political economy at PolicyGrounds and reviews new research in The Research Rundown, her newsletter on Substack. This page lists all 70 PolicyGrounds essays and all 44 Research Rundown issues, with links to each. It also lists her articles in other publications, her interviews and quotes in the press, and her work with the All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA).

The essays cover the Union budget and fiscal federalism, welfare and cash transfers, jobs and wages, electoral rolls and the anti-defection law, examinations and higher education, health, air pollution and climate policy, trade agreements, and civil liberties. The newsletter summarises published research on development in South Asia, with a focus on gender, labour, migration, health and measurement.

PolicyGrounds

Long-form essays at policygrounds.press, 70 in all, newest first. PolicyGrounds also carries the comic Grounding Truths.

2026

  1. July 2026

    The Cockroaches Came Together

    Reads the Cockroach Janta Party protests and the 20 July 2026 march on Parliament against repeated examination leaks, a labour market with far more applicants than public posts, and the history of student movements in India and its neighbours, and sets out what the Union government should do.

  2. July 2026

    Please Try Again

    Examines how India's free-at-the-point-of-use payment and identity systems shift the costs of authentication failures and transaction friction onto poor users, and calls for public failure-rate data, a funded human fallback and enforcement of the UPI market-share cap.

  3. July 2026

    The Epic Failure of the EPIC

    Argues that the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls reversed the founding presumption of inclusion by demanding documents most poor citizens lack, and uses Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal data to show deletions fell disproportionately on married women, Muslims and likely Dalits and Adivasis.

  4. July 2026

    The Bill Comes Due: Five States, One Union, and the Arithmetic of Welfare After 2026

    Examines the cash-transfer promises made by five newly elected state governments in 2026 against a fiscal settlement set by the Sixteenth Finance Commission, a lapsed GST compensation cess and a shrinking divisible pool, and compares how each state is managing the gap.

  5. June 2026

    An Island Off the Books: The Development Accounting Behind Great Nicobar

    Applies development accounting to the Great Nicobar mega-project to show that the official case omits the costs of rainforest loss, the displacement of the Shompen and seismic risk, and that its justification shifts from commercial to strategic grounds when challenged.

  6. June 2026

    Welfare, Listed: India's Social Stock Exchange and the Market in Welfare

    Examines the May 2026 rules letting companies meet part of their CSR obligation through Social Stock Exchange instruments, alongside the Corporate Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026 that would reduce the number of companies owing CSR, and argues that together they shrink a public duty and move what remains into a thin market.

  7. June 2026

    The Dal Comes by Ship: India's Pulses Mission and Its Own Import Policy

    Analyses the contradiction between the Mission for Aatmanirbharta in Pulses and duty-free pulse imports, drawing on procurement history, yield data and nutrition evidence to propose duty stability, funded procurement or price-deficit payments, and long-term breeding investment.

  8. June 2026

    The Cash and the Category: How the BJP's Eastern Project Reconstituted Welfare Politics

    Traces how cash transfers shaped the May 2026 West Bengal and Assam election results and how Bengal's new government enlarged its women's transfer while tying eligibility to citizenship verification, reading the shift through fiscal and political frameworks.

  9. May 2026

    The Bill After the Raid

    Reads the Supreme Court's Prajwala judgment as treating trafficking as a market that runs on poverty and rehabilitation as a funded right, and asks who will pay for that right and how the money will reach survivors.

  10. May 2026

    The Screen That Could Not Read

    Examines CBSE's 2026 shift to on-screen evaluation of Class XII answer books, the removal of the recheck safeguard and the rescanning that followed, and sets out what a credible marking system would require.

  11. May 2026

    The Paper Travels First

    Uses the May 2026 NEET-UG paper leak to examine twelve years of recurring examination leaks, the coaching and seat-buying economy around them, the failures of the legal and institutional response, and the cost borne by aspirants.

  12. May 2026

    Eleven Years, Six Asks: The Policy Ledger Behind Modi's Austerity Appeal

    Sets the Prime Minister's six wartime austerity appeals of May 2026 against eleven years of policy on fuel reserves, edible oil, gold, travel, transport and manufacturing to show the vulnerabilities each appeal names were left unaddressed.

  13. May 2026

    Five Seats Short: The Mamallapuram Resort, the Tenth Schedule, and the Mathematics of Indian Defection

    Uses the post-election resort politics in Tamil Nadu in May 2026 to examine fragmented mandates, the weaknesses of the Tenth Schedule and the state's history of personalist parties, and proposes changes to government-formation rules.

  14. May 2026

    The Road That Runs Back: India's Reverse Structural Transformation

    Documents India's rising agricultural employment share since 2018-19 as a reversal of structural transformation, linking it to premature deindustrialisation, weakened MGNREGA, women's unpaid family labour and stagnant wages.

  15. April 2026

    Reading the Centre's Books: What CAG Report No. 6 of 2026 Tells Us About Union Finances

    Reads CAG Report No. 6 of 2026 on Union finances, covering uncertified grants, Minor Head 800 entries, cesses outside the divisible pool and gaps between appropriation and spending, to show the accounts no longer match the movement of money.

  16. April 2026

    Counters Without Outcomes: The Chadha Defection and What India's Anti-Defection Law Was Built to Permit

    Uses the April 2026 merger of seven AAP Rajya Sabha members into the BJP to show how the Tenth Schedule's two-thirds rule and Speaker-led adjudication permit defection, with particular attention to Punjab's fiscal position.

  17. April 2026

    What India Promised the Planet

    Marks Earth Day 2026 by assessing India's climate pledges against air quality standards, forest and land policy, heat and disaster finance and the Sixteenth Finance Commission award, and asks who bears environmental costs.

  18. April 2026

    Women, Delimitation, and the Design of Representation Deferred

    Draws on evidence from women's reservation in panchayats to argue that the bill defeated in the Lok Sabha on 17 April 2026 used women's reservation as cover for delimitation, and sets out how the 2023 Act should be implemented.

  19. April 2026

    The Economist Outside the Granary and the Court

    Revisits B.R. Ambedkar's economic writing on land, labour, currency and federal finance, explains how post-independence planning sidelined it, and shows how current data on landholding, wealth and wages bears out his analysis.

  20. April 2026

    Census 2027 and the Politics of Not Knowing

    Argues that sixteen years without a census has determined ration entitlements, representation and state recognition, and examines the design, delays, delimitation stakes and digital risks of Census 2027.

  21. April 2026

    The Advisory Is Now Law: India's New IT Rules and the New Information Control

    Examines the 2026 amendments to India's IT Rules and the revived fact-check mechanism, arguing that delegated legislation and weak consultation have expanded executive control over online information.

  22. April 2026

    What Ails India's Health: Insurance Without a System

    Contrasts the enrolment of 70 crore people in health insurance with persistent child stunting to argue that India has built insurance coverage without a public health system, drawing on CAG findings, peer-reviewed studies and POSHAN 2.0 data.

  23. April 2026

    Tamil Nadu's Welfare Gamble: The Thousand Rupees and What It Cannot Buy

    Assesses Tamil Nadu's monthly cash transfer to women against evidence on unconditional transfers, household debt and kinship, and asks whether the state that built the Dravidian welfare model of universal services needed to follow the national cash-transfer trend.

  24. March 2026

    The Unaccountable State

    Traces fifty years of amendments to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, including the 2020 amendment and the 2026 bill, to show how the law has been used to remove organisations that hold the state to account.

  25. March 2026

    The Constitution Cannot Tell Caste to Leave, When Faith Does Not

    Critiques the Supreme Court's March 2026 ruling that Scheduled Caste protections end on conversion to Christianity, using government commission evidence and Ambedkar's writing to argue the 1950 Presidential Order rests on an unprincipled religious test.

  26. March 2026

    India Has Never Measured Its Own Inequality. That Is Not an Accident.

    Shows that India has never conducted a national income distribution survey, contrasts the consumption-based Gini with World Inequality Lab income estimates, and argues the measurement gap serves political ends.

  27. March 2026

    The Budget That Parliament Voted On Has Already Expired

    Examines how the February 2026 GDP base-year revision changed the fiscal arithmetic of the Union Budget weeks after Parliament received it, and what this means for parliamentary scrutiny and state finances.

  28. March 2026

    Define and Rule: What Zohran Mamdani's Capitulations Reveal About the Price of Power

    Argues that New York mayor Zohran Mamdani pairs strong public positions on Palestine with repeated concessions under personal pressure, and reads the pattern as structural through the scholarship of his father, Mahmood Mamdani.

  29. March 2026

    The Price of Someone Else's War: What the US-Israeli Bombing of Iran Costs India and the World

    Examines the economic costs of the US-Israeli war on Iran, including oil supply disruption, displacement and India's LPG shortages, and places it in a longer history of Western intervention in the region.

  30. March 2026

    The Last Dam Has Broken: BJP's Rajya Sabha Majority and the Legislative Flood That Follows

    Argues that the NDA's March 2026 Rajya Sabha majority removes the upper house as a check on the executive, using the Transgender Persons Amendment Bill as an early case of what the new arithmetic permits.

  31. February 2026

    The India-US Trade Deal: A Framework of Asymmetries

    Compares the American and Indian accounts of the February 2026 India-US trade deal to show asymmetric concessions on tariffs, purchase commitments, agriculture and Russian oil, and the lack of a published text.

  32. February 2026

    The Modi Epstein Files: When Private Wealth Intermediates State Policy

    Uses released correspondence between Jeffrey Epstein and Anil Ambani around Modi's 2017 Israel visit to examine how private elite networks can mediate state policy and weaken formal institutions.

  33. February 2026

    The Orange Economy Delusion: Training Workers for Other Nations' Creative Empires

    Critiques the Budget 2026-27 Orange Economy allocation for AVGC skills training, contrasting it with South Korean and Chinese investment in content ownership and arguing India is training workers for other countries' creative industries.

  34. February 2026

    Skill India or Scam India: How ₹14,450 Crore Vanished Into Ghost Trainees and Paper Centers

    Uses CAG findings on the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana to document fabricated trainees, paper centres, duplicate accounts and weak placement outcomes, and links the failures to India's squandered demographic dividend.

  35. February 2026

    Budget 2026-27: The Numbers Behind the Noise

    Reads the Budget 2026-27 Demands for Grants and off-budget funds sector by sector, covering employment, health cesses, education, MSMEs, environment, agriculture and state transfers, to show where announcements lack allocations.

  36. February 2026

    Imperial Economics Returns: The Rules-Based Order Dies in Caracas, Copenhagen, and Havana

    Argues that US actions against Venezuela, Greenland and Cuba are dismantling the rules-based order, explains why predictable rules matter for developing economies, and assesses India's exposure.

  37. February 2026

    India's AI Deficit: The World's Largest Engineering Pipeline Produces Workers, Not Innovators

    Examines the gap between India's AI and semiconductor ambitions and its record on R&D spending, research investment, talent emigration and failed fab proposals, and what automation means for the IT services workforce.

  38. February 2026

    The UGC Equity Rules: How Student Suicides Became a BJP Political Crisis

    Examines the UGC equity regulations on caste discrimination in higher education, the political backlash they triggered, and the human capital cost of institutional discrimination set against meagre equity budgets.

  39. February 2026

    The Rs 41,700 Crore Question: When Budget Allocations Have No Names

    Examines the Department of Economic Affairs' Rs 41,700 crore allocation to an undefined New Schemes line in Budget 2026-27, after Rs 62,593 crore under the same head in 2024-25 saw only about 14 per cent spent, as a case of budget opacity that escapes parliamentary scrutiny.

  40. January 2026

    Our Money, Our Accounts: How India's Transparency Revolution Is Being Strangled in Three Acts

    Traces the weakening of the Right to Information Act through the 2019 amendment, the data protection law's change to Section 8(1)(j) and the Economic Survey 2026 proposal for ministerial vetoes, set against RTI's record in exposing corruption.

  41. January 2026

    When the State Admits It's Coming for You: Himanta Biswa Sarma and the Weaponisation of Voter Rolls

    Examines Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma's January 2026 statement on preventing Miya Muslims from voting, the use of Form 7 objections to delete voters, and the links between NRC, CAA and voter deletion.

  42. January 2026

    The Tale of Two Economies: Reading the Economic Survey Against Ground Reality

    Reads the Economic Survey 2025-26 against ground data on growth, employment, rural work, inequality, health and education, and manufacturing to show what the Survey omits or reframes.

  43. January 2026

    When the IMF Speaks in Rupees: The Economic Case Against India's Poisoned Air

    Takes up Gita Gopinath's framing of air pollution as an economic cost, explains how economists count pollution losses, and argues the economic framing could shift policy.

  44. January 2026

    Budgets: The Arithmetic of Fiscal Centralisation

    Examines how cesses and surcharges outside the divisible pool, chronic welfare underspending and rising interest payments have centralised fiscal power in the Union budget at the expense of states.

  45. January 2026

    The Fine Print of the 'Mother of All Deals': What India Conceded in the EU-India FTA

    Examines the fine print of the EU-India free trade agreement, including the absence of a CBAM exemption, risks to generic pharmaceuticals and automobile tariff cuts, and what India conceded.

  46. January 2026

    What Maketh a Republic? India at 77

    Uses Republic Day 2026 to contrast ceremonial displays of sovereignty with constitutional promises on fiscal federalism, wages, wealth concentration and hunger.

  47. January 2026

    Stock and Flow: Why India's Welfare State Cannot Touch Wealth

    Examines rising wealth concentration in India and argues that DBT-style welfare smooths consumption but leaves wealth stocks intact; contrasts India's approach with Scotland's move toward legislated wealth redistribution.

  48. January 2026

    The Cleanest City That Killed Its Residents: Dashboard Governance and the Bodies Beneath

    Uses Indore's 'cleanest city' rankings to show how dashboard metrics can mask infrastructural neglect and lethal failures in urban governance.

  49. January 2026

    The Education They're Building: VBSA Bill and the Manufactured Crisis in Indian Learning

    Argues that sustained persecution, defunding, and institutional weakening of public universities has enabled legislation that recasts education as private extraction rather than a public good.

  50. January 2026

    The Silence of the "Vishwaguru": India's Muted Response to Trump's Venezuela Invasion

    Analyses India's restrained diplomatic response to a major sovereignty violation, contrasting it with stronger condemnations by other states and probing the politics of strategic silence.

  51. January 2026

    The Law That Eats Due Process: How UAPA Became India's Preferred Tool for Preventive Detention

    Details how UAPA's low conviction rates, prolonged pre-trial imprisonment, and restrictive bail architecture have made it a preferred instrument for preventive detention and dissent suppression.

  52. January 2026

    The Genocide That Wasn't: How Indian Media Manufactured a Bangladesh Crisis

    Contrasts verified incident patterns with amplified genocide claims to argue that sections of Indian media manufactured a Bangladesh 'genocide' narrative for domestic political ends.

2025

  1. December 2025

    MSME Sector Under Siege: A Decade of BJP's Destruction

    Examines how demonetisation, GST implementation, and COVID-era policy choices disproportionately damaged small enterprises and accelerated wealth transfer upward.

  2. December 2025

    The Economist Who Understood: Manmohan Singh, One Year On

    Reflects on Manmohan Singh's economic and political legacy, including rights-based legislation, tribal policy controversies and the nuclear deal, and contrasts substantive statesmanship with contemporary performative politics.

  3. December 2025

    The Aravallis Are Dying: How India's Oldest Mountains Became a Definitional Casualty

    Shows how definitional and measurement politics can enable environmental destruction, using the Aravallis' degradation and enforcement failures as a case study.

  4. December 2025

    The Cruel Irony of SHANTI: A Reckoning with India's Nuclear Peace

    A personal-political essay linking nuclear policy symbolism to disarmament advocacy, and to the human costs borne by communities affected by militarised national projects.

  5. December 2025

    One Nation, Unequal Returns: How the Centre Learned to Keep the Money

    Explains how cesses, surcharges, and GST-related fiscal arrangements have weakened state finances and shifted burdens onto citizens despite reform promises.

  6. December 2025

    The Falling Rupee: Currency, Sovereignty, and the Price of Dependence

    Revisits the political economy of currency depreciation through Ambedkar's monetary arguments and contemporary distributional impacts across sectors and households.

  7. December 2025

    ₹96.72: Who Gets the Discount When Crude Falls?

    Interrogates the 'cheap oil' narrative to show how benefits often fail to reach consumers, shaping an energy and mobility political economy with distributive consequences.

  8. December 2025

    In the Name of RAM: How India Just Dismantled Its Rural Safety Net

    Argues that the VB-G RAM G Bill undermines MGNREGA through fiscal and institutional redesign, turning promised employment days into a large-scale public resource reallocation.

  9. December 2025

    The Great Indian Migration Wave: 150 Years of Invisible Citizens

    Traces how colonial labor extraction, federal failures, and domicile politics have produced persistent migrant precarity and 'invisible' citizenship for mobile workers.

  10. December 2025

    The Development State That Showed Up

    Uses investigative reporting on RSS-linked parallel infrastructure to argue that contesting Hindutva politics also requires rebuilding credible welfare-state capacity.

  11. December 2025

    The Gas Chamber We Call Home

    Discusses India's air pollution crisis, highlighting structural industrial sources, policy failures, scapegoating dynamics, and economic losses from chronic exposure.

  12. December 2025

    The Jobless Recovery Nobody Wants to Explain

    Challenges headline recovery narratives by focusing on post-COVID labour market signals that indicate persistent distress and uneven employment outcomes.

2021

  1. August 2021

    Data Obfuscation as Modi Operandi

    Reflects on the 2021 COVID-19 second wave alongside the politics of economic and health-data opacity, arguing that obfuscation corrodes accountability and response capacity.

2020

  1. November 2020

    The Costs of Poor Policy Design

    Critiques targeted welfare approaches and corruption framings, arguing for self-targeting social policy design and more humane, incentive-aware governance.

  2. October 2020

    Safety Nets, As If People Matter

    Argues that India's agricultural sector, with diminishing returns to labour on shrinking landholdings, needs targeted safety nets, and proposes using MGNREGA flexibly to support migrants and rural demand during the pandemic.

  3. October 2020

    Meet Mr. Stagflation

    Explains stagflation in plain terms, argues that India in 2020 faced slow growth alongside rising prices, and uses PLFS participation data to question official claims on skilling and employment.

  4. October 2020

    The Hats Our Kids Should Never Wear

    Critiques edtech advertising that sells coding classes to parents of young children, drawing on the author's own experience of a demo class and on evidence that parental involvement matters more for learning outcomes.

  5. October 2020

    The Unemployment Problem Nobody Wants To Talk About

    Argues that India's unemployment problem predates the pandemic, using PLFS data and investment indicators to trace it to structural weaknesses in manufacturing and the informal sector.

Other publications

Articles and op-eds in newspapers and magazines, 14 in all, newest first. Some PolicyGrounds essays were also published in these outlets.

  1. 30 July 2026

    The Cockroaches Came Together

    Mainstream Weekly

  2. 22 May 2026

  3. 21 May 2026

    The two test neat solution to the NEET mess

    The Times of India, Edit Page

  4. 16 May 2026

  5. 23 April 2026

  6. 10 April 2026

    The Unaccountable State

    Mainstream Weekly

  7. 31 March 2026

  8. 15 February 2026

  9. 6 February 2026

  10. 7 January 2026

  11. 21 December 2025

  12. 22 November 2025

  13. 17 October 2025

  14. 8 February 2023

The Research Rundown

A newsletter on varna.substack.com. It began as a monthly edition in June 2024. Since September 2026 it also runs a daily digest, Friday Findings, Methods Monday on measurement and survey methods, and Good Reads, which takes one study at a time.

Monthly editions (9)

  1. Gandhi Jayanti special, October 2026

  2. September 2026

  3. July 2026

  4. May 2026

  5. March 2026

  6. August 2025

  7. June 2025

  8. April 2025

  9. June 2024

Good Reads (13)

  1. No. 1

  2. No. 2

  3. No. 3

  4. No. 4

  5. No. 5

  6. No. 6

  7. No. 7

  8. No. 8

  9. No. 9

  10. No. 10

  11. No. 11

  12. No. 12

  13. No. 13

Daily (14)

Friday Findings (4)

Methods Monday (4)

Interviews and quotes

Interviews with Varna and reports that quote her.

  1. 6 October 2026

    450K families, 90 questions: India’s first income survey can’t get people to reveal their income

    The Ken

    Quoted on why income is hard to survey, in Inderpal Singh's report on the National Household Income Survey.

  2. 8 August 2026

    When protest becomes memory: Pallavi Nayak and Varna Sri Raman on archiving dissent

    The Hindu

    Interview with Pallavi Nayak and Varna by Deba Durllava Harichandan on Democracy by Design, their archive of protest posters and placards.

  3. 4 February 2026

    Govt collects health cess, but spends less than it did earlier

    The Times of India

    Quoted on how the Union government decides what share of the health cess reaches the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Nidhi, in Rema Nagarajan's report.

Feminist movement work

Varna is a member of the All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA), a national feminist platform of the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM). ALIFA has a national group of 320 members, thematic groups and state chapters. She joined in 2026.

  • She worked on ALIFA's representation to the Election Commission of India on gender justice in the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, from the urgent appeal in July 2026 to the rejoinder after the Commission rejected it later that month. The Hindu, The Times of India, The Leaflet, Scroll and Counterview reported on it.
  • She is the lead drafter of ALIFA's statements, with contributions from other members. These include the statement of solidarity with Delhi women students protesting sexual violence and the response to the Samastha circular in Kerala, both in September 2026.
  • She wrote the draft protocol for how ALIFA produces its statements, and built its press coverage tracker, which holds more than 40 reports from March to October 2026 in outlets including The Hindu, The Wire, The News Minute, Scroll, SabrangIndia and Counterview. She also built a list of feminist and women-led media, a log of where each statement was sent, and letterheads in English and Hindi.
  • She prepared the draft organisational development charter for the Organisational Action Group, covering state chapters, how decisions are made, the framework for groups, internal safety, and records and resources. She also revised the terms of reference for the Organisational Strengthening Group.
  • She is a member of the group that produces Feminist Frontlines, ALIFA's quarterly magazine, and prepared the working pack for its first issue.

ALIFA in the press, 2026 (44)

Reports on ALIFA's statements and representations, and reprints of them, from the coverage tracker Varna maintains. Newest first.

  1. 1 October 2026

  2. 30 September 2026

  3. 22 September 2026

  4. 22 September 2026

  5. 21 September 2026

  6. 21 September 2026

  7. 10 September 2026

  8. 9 September 2026

  9. 4 September 2026

  10. 10 August 2026

  11. 9 August 2026

  12. 9 August 2026

  13. August 2026

  14. 28 July 2026

  15. 20 July 2026

  16. 20 July 2026

  17. 15 July 2026

  18. 15 July 2026

  19. 15 July 2026

  20. 11 July 2026

  21. 10 July 2026

  22. 9 July 2026

  23. 4 July 2026

  24. 3 July 2026

  25. 3 July 2026

  26. 3 July 2026

  27. 25 June 2026

  28. 25 June 2026

  29. 24 June 2026

  30. 24 June 2026

  31. 24 June 2026

  32. 21 May 2026

  33. 21 May 2026

  34. 20 May 2026

  35. 20 May 2026

  36. 17 April 2026

  37. 28 March 2026

  38. 26 March 2026

  39. 26 March 2026

  40. 26 March 2026

  41. 21 March 2026

  42. 21 March 2026

  43. 20 March 2026

  44. 19 March 2026

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